


Buried Light

by glitter_ature



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Absolute Trash, Complete, Enemies to Allies To Lovers, F/M, I'm so done with my own twisted mind, Kylo Ren is an absolute fucking idiot, Slow Burn, So much angst, and the pink trees, but we all love him, little bit of an Avatar crossover going on here, the magical spores
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 21:51:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 44
Words: 106,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6301708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitter_ature/pseuds/glitter_ature
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small part of her had hoped that the dream she’d had was just her subconscious playing tricks; that Leia’s cover story about the battle droids had been true. But here he is, Kylo Ren – <em>Jedi Killer, murderer of Han Solo and countless others, apprentice Sith</em> – kneeling in front of her, head bowed.</p><p>She recovers herself, pulling out the blue lightsaber but holding off on igniting it. ‘Quite the theatrical entrance, Ren. Don’t strain yourself on my account, though.’</p><p>Her enemy shakes the tangled curls out of his eyes and glances up at her. His face creases into such a dreadful scowl that Rey breaks eye contact.</p><p>‘Is this a <em>joke?’</em> Ren hisses from between clenched teeth, still holding his injured side. ‘I summon the Supreme Leader and he sends me the damned <em>scavenger?’</em></p><p>Rey shrugs. ‘You must be out of favour. Wouldn’t be anything to do with being beaten up by a girl, would it?’</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Old Hurts

It’s another freezing night in the desolate Outer Rim. Gelid stars wink in their white haloes, and the silhouette of a space shuttle carves out a portion of the night, upturned bat-like wings scything through deep space.

“We’re approximately three parsecs away from Kintan now, sir,’ the keen young pilot calls toward the starboard window of the _Upsilon_. The command shuttle is traveling with a skeleton crew, just the pilot, a few Stormtroopers and a couple of technical droids, on a classified mission to meet with the Nikto overlords to assess the possibility of Kintan as a new base for the First Order.

‘Nothing but Nikto and noxious air,’ the recipient of this information murmurs to himself. ‘Are we approaching any hyperdrive channels?’ The man’s voice is distorted and muffled by a helmetlike contraption he wears, polished in some parts and matte in others, pitted with scars from battles long past. ‘If you find one, enter it immediately. I would prefer to depart for Moraband again as soon as possible.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The pilot bows his head respectfully and begins pressing buttons and pulling levers on the shuttle’s dashboard. The masked man turns back to the viewport, appearing to watch the revolving nebulae and chunks of defunct comet outside through the void-like eye section of the mask. He stares out at the detritus of space for a while, before a loud _thunk_ and a hissing sound draws his attention.

‘Uh…’ the pilot stutters, clearly panicking, ‘something seems to have malfunctioned.’

‘I can see that,’ the masked man replies coldly. ‘How do you propose to fix it?’

The pilot’s Adam’s apple bobs rapidly in his throat. ‘I – I’m not a specialist in _Upsilon_ -class engines, I-‘

The masked man calmly reaches for a cylinder holstered at his side and presses a button: the cylinder erupts into a long, sputtering blade, red as hellspawn, with twin quillons funneling excess energy to the left and right of the weapon. The masked man raises the glowing sword to the shoulder of the pilot, who trembles in his seat. ‘I repeat. How do you propose to fix it?’

‘Lord Ren, I can’t-‘

The masked man swings the sword in a deadly arc, sparks trailing behind the blade and popping in midair. But before the blade can meet its target –

A screech of metal as the command deck is rent by an unstoppable force, caving in around the shape of a rogue asteroid. Pieces of blue ice and rock skid across the breached hull, and the alarms spring to life with a piercing wail. The masked man whirls round just in time to avoid an enormous chunk of asteroid that flies past him and collides with both the pilot and the shuttle’s dashboard, which releases a couple of angry beeps before short-circuiting. Air is hissing out of the giant holes in the ship, which has begun to spin and is fast entering free-fall.

The masked man lunges for the shuttle’s controls, trying in vain to find the magic button that will fix the airlock and restore power to the ion engines. He even lifts a hand and points at the command deck, which seems utterly pointless to the panicked Stormtroopers, and he soon gives up the fruitless exercise. He grips the pilot’s seat tightly, ignoring the mashed corpse of what had previously been a talking, sweating, stuttering person. The shuttle is falling at terminal velocity, and smears of blue and green can be briefly glimpsed beyond the windows. Faster. Faster –

 _Crash_. Glass splinters and metal tears, and fireballs leap for freedom from the ruins of the engine. Flames lick at the shuttle ramp and the grass beneath it. Excited shouts can be heard in the distance, and before two minutes have passed a mob of tentacled aliens have swarmed the wreckage of the craft, extinguishing flames and looting through the rubble.

 --

His mask is going to suffocate him. He reaches up and, after struggling for a few seconds, removes it with a click and a hiss of depressurization. Wild black curls fall to his shoulders, and a proud, prominent nose wrinkles in distaste at the moist air of this strange place.

Kylo Ren pushes himself to his feet. Remarkably, he hasn’t been grievously hurt, or even hurt at all beyond a few scrapes, when he’d been thrown from the wreckage upon impact. The Force had obviously played a part in his salvation, he assures himself. This thesis is backed up by the grisly sight of the Stormtroopers he’d brought with him, who are now strewn in several places over the ground. The technical droids have burst open upon impact with the ground: they spin their exposed inner whirligigs in death throes, and then go still.

He tests out his ability to walk, and finding it satisfactory, strides toward the turrets of smoke he can see beyond a copse of odd pink-leafed trees.

Kylo hurries over to his spacecraft and assesses the damage. Debris from the various mechanisms of the dashboard, engine, and all the other instruments of shuttles that he knows nothing about. No pilot. No hyperdrive. No conceivable way of flying off this planet and back to Moraband, where Snoke will be waiting to rendezvous. _Damn it all._

If he had been holding his lightsaber, he would have added to the ship’s destruction out of pure frustration. As it is, he’d dropped it when the chunk of space rock had flown past him, and it appears that the _Upsilon_ has been picked clean between the time he’d been ejected and the time it had taken to regain consciousness. Filthy scavengers are everywhere these days, eking out an existence by taking what wasn’t rightfully theirs. If one of the thieves had taken his lightsaber, he would be happy to extinguish what little of a life the damned alien had, and the lives of his family too –

He suddenly spots a familiar tube under a pile of broken rock. Blackened by ash but still recognizable as his beloved hand-crafted saber. He stretches out an arm and uses the Force to will it to him, and it jumps eagerly into his hand, sending rocks rolling towards the ramp.

Kylo walks out of the carcass of his shuttle, eyes scanning the panorama of trees and distant mountains for any landmarks that might tell him where he is. _Nothing_.

Anger scores through him as he stalks through the pink forest again. No transport. No food. No water until further notice. No connection to his comrades that he can think of right now. He was supposed to have landed on Kintan. Nobody would know he was here. He has no technical skills to engineer a new craft or send a radio broadcast to the First Order; only his considerable mastery of the Force at his disposal.

Thinking about it, the Force seems to have a different dynamic here. Normally, if he closed his eyes and concentrated, as his foolish Jedi uncle had once taught him, the unfathomable net of energy that made up the Force would ebb and flow before his consciousness, equal and opposite points of light and darkness rippling through and around him. Here, as he probes the field of energy, he is assaulted with an overpowering sense of the light, with few pools of darkness eddying at the corners of his mind.

 _So_ , he’ll follow the path to the darkness he senses. He will draw the Dark side around him like a blanket, and try to send a message to his master.

He keeps his eyes closed as he traces a path to the nearest patch of dark energy, blindly following the Force map in his thoughts, each step plunging him further into the blackness.

 --

After what seems like an hour, Kylo stops at his mental destination. He opens his eyes and – does a double take. He’s surrounded by an army of battle droids.

In a split second, Kylo has made a desperate movement to gather the Force to him, not caring whether it is light or dark energy as long as it preserves his life. He holds it for a moment and then shoves it violently from his being, radiating a Force field that will hopefully stop any lasers the battle droids fire.

But they don’t fire.

Keeping a tenuous hold on his Force-shield, Kylo examines the nearest group of droids. He almost laughs out of relief when he realizes that they have been disassembled, stripped of some of their vital parts and obviously left here as scrap for this planet’s junkyard. Some are holding blaster guns, but he doubts they would work without the proper command system these droids aren’t capable of on their own. He moves forward to check another group of dismembered robots, and when he’s certain that he isn’t in danger of being sliced in two, he releases the shield.

Kylo starts to walk around the perimeter set up by the droids, marveling at their design. These are obviously remnants from the Clone Wars, which he has read of in history books but never seen more than illustrations of. Most of the droids he can identify from remembered diagrams as B1 generations, but there are a few at the back of the pack that he thinks might be droidekas, or destroyer droids.

He steps over the appendages of a battle droid and leans towards the droidekas, which resemble Tattooine scorpions on hind legs, equipped with twin blasters on their mechanical extremities.

He is face to face with one of the Droidekas when it emits a squealing sound and a green light flashes on in the equivalent of a head.

‘Scanning target,’ the droid beeps. ‘Utilizing database for possible matches. Target acquired: Anakin Skywalker. Orders: **destroy**.’

Before Kylo has processed this information, a thin beam extends out of the droid’s blaster and lights upon his arm. Kylo lets out a strangled scream as the laser beam burns a hole through his armour and cuts a scorching line across his skin. He drops to the ground as the beam narrowly misses his neck, and ignites his lightsaber. Slicing upward as he hauls himself back to his feet, he cuts open the bowels of the droideka, which spills gears and wiring onto the grass. He hacks at it again, but before he can finish it off, another three droidekas are rolling at high speed towards him. One fires its blaster and catches him in the side, knocking the wind out of him as agony sears across every synapse. They’ve struck the old bowcaster wound his father’s infernal Wookie pet had given him and ripped it open. Hot blood scatters like rubies onto the grass.

A Knight of Ren never turns tail in the face of his enemies. No Lord would ever display such a lack of honour. Loathing himself, Kylo draws in the Force and sends a harsh throb of energy toward his pursuers. And then he runs for his life.

His heart is throbbing so fast in his chest that he’s on the brink of losing consciousness as he runs, and he knows that the harder his heart works, the more blood he’s losing from the blaster wounds. He draws desperately on the Force again, trying to will his heart to slow and his wounds to knit, but he can’t concentrate fully on the task, running at full tilt.

He’s lost sight of the rolling droidekas, and in a flash of inspiration, Kylo launches himself at the trunk of one of the pink trees, scrambling up the trunk and into the branches, panting and shaking from blood loss as he climbs higher and higher, until he thinks the interference of the thick leaves will disrupt the droids’ scanners.

In the treetops, he presses a hand over the hole in his side and listens for the whirring of the droidekas. The pain is radiating through every muscle, every nerve, buzzing in his head and clouding over his vision. As Kylo feels himself slipping towards a blackout, he envisions the Supreme Leader, reaches for the dark energy of the Force and projects his thoughts as strongly as he can, sending a message across thousands of star systems. But he’s too weak to maintain the connection, and the message gets twisted violently halfway through and redirected to the next face that flashes into his mind before he passes out: a face, sweet with love but wrinkled with worry. _Mother_.

 


	2. Have Faith In Me

General Leia Organa has just retired to her bedchambers for the night. She’s sitting at her mirror, picking her grey mane loose from its businesslike plait when an arrow of random pain almost cleaves her skull in two. She cries out and her head hits the glass, a panicked array of half-formed images reeling through her mind too quickly for thought to catch up.

_The smoking wreckage of a First Order starship. A forest of trees festooned with pink blossoms and leaves. The impassive metallic face of a droid as it fired a blaster gun. And a black-haired man slumped in the branches of a tree, bleeding profusely from an awful wound in his side._

_“ – badly injured, Lord, please…’ the words were cut off by an tortured gasp, and then the voice flowed through her mind again, the dual familiarity and strangeness of it squeezing her heart._

_‘… please… find me here…’_

The connection is severed so abruptly that Leia slides off her stool and onto the floor, landing with a thud that shakes the pictures on the walls. She can hear in the background as C3PO and another medical droid enter her room, but her ears are filled with that voice she’s missed so dearly since she’d sent him away.

‘Ben,’ she whispers, tears splashing her cheeks as C3PO lifts her off the ground. ‘Ben.’

And as the droids try to soothe her, a last image flashes into her mind. _A young girl, wielding a blue lightsaber, burning a path through driving snow._

‘Is there anything I can do for you, mistress?’ Threepio asks anxiously.

‘Tell Chewbacca to set a course for Ahch-To at dawn. Ask him – ask him to bring Rey back for a visit,’ she says haltingly, swiping at her eyes.

The droid pats her shoulder awkwardly, and then clanks out of her room, leaving the med-droid behind to tend to her.

\--

Rey is balancing on a boulder, cross-legged with her palms spread over her knees. The crucible of the sun sets fire to her lashes and hair, turning her skin to gold as she breathes in the Light that blooms with the pink dawn. Luke is hovering next to her in the lotus position, meditating too, when he suddenly speaks, breaking their trance.

‘Someone is here for you.’

She opens her eyes, twisting round to look at her master. In the two months since she’d journeyed to Luke’s secret hideout and begged him to train her, they’ve had no visitors, no communications from the rest of the galaxy. Her scope of the universe has shrunk to this small aquatic planet, the one other person she has for company often absent or meditating, like now. She gets the impression that Luke Skywalker had been a very charismatic man - but he is quieter now, moulded by the time he’s spent in seclusion, not needing to cut his teeth on conversation.

He resembles the legends she’d heard of the last Jedi when they train, though. He seems to grow taller, more alive when he is teaching her how to levitate rocks, to sense opponent’s tactical strikes before they happen, to manipulate objects telekinetically. Sometimes he can even be coaxed to talk to her about the past: about Anakin Skywalker, his father; his mission to rescue Leia, who he would later find out was his sister, _after_ she had kissed him; his own botched yet useful training under Master Yoda in the swamps of Dagobah. They both steer clear of any topic concerning Han Solo – Luke had been informed of his death by Chewbacca when they’d first arrived on Ahch-To – and they don’t ever speak of Kylo Ren.

Now he speaks again, smiling ruefully. ‘It’s time for a break. Go on, Rey.’

She clambers off the rock and dashes down the twisting steps cut into the terrain of their island, turning a corner to see a familiar figure, tall and furry, yodeling in greeting.

‘ _Chewie_!’ She hurls herself at the oversized Wookiee, nuzzling her face into his shaggy chest. Chewbacca purrs, hugging her back for a moment before growling a question.

‘Luke? He’s up here.’ She takes his clawed hand and leads the Wookiee up the hundreds of steps to the Jedi Temple, bombarding him with questions about the Resistance all the while. Out of breath, they climb the last few stairs to meet her master, who inclines his head politely, the definition of poise and detachment.

‘Hello, Chewbacca.’

The Wookiee roars at the cool welcome, and scoops the short Jedi up in his furry arms, almost crushing his spleen into his backbone with a hug.

‘ _Ow_! Chewie!’ Luke complains, laughing a little as Chewbacca returns him to solid ground. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

Luke directs Rey to wait outside as he walks with Chewbacca into the stone temple. She climbs back onto her boulder at the edge of the bluff and tries to let go of her excitement, scrubbing her mind clean of all emotion. She sits in the lotus position for an hour, the calming spray of the ocean in her ears, specks of light winking in the net of the Force, vibrating in time with her breaths.

Finally, she hears the Wookiee’s growl again, and jumps off the rock, standing attentively as Luke comes over to her.

‘Leia wants you back on the D’Qar base for a few days, just as a respite. Chewie’s here to take you back.’

Rey’s brow furrows. ‘Okay… but-‘

Luke lifts a hand, finishing her sentence. ‘I cannot go with you. It’s still too dangerous for me to come out of hiding, even considering the current instability of the First Order. When you return, we will resume your training. Enjoy the break, Rey – you’ve earned it.’

She wants to hug him, but settles for a handshake. ‘Thank you, Master.’

Later, as the Falcon lifts off, she turns back to the window, seeing the lone figure in brown robes watching the ship depart, and feels a twinge of pity for the isolated Jedi. She presses her hand to the window in farewell, hoping he sees.

 --

‘I’ve got another couple months of this thing and a few more bacta tank immersions and I’m good to go,’ Finn grins, pushing his power chair back on its wheels and rocking impressively. Rey has only been on D’Qar for an hour, and she ‘s already up to date on all the gossip, thanks to her best friend, who’s had nothing better to do for the last two months than lie flat in bed and eavesdrop on other rebels. He’s made an astonishing recovery from his injuries, and Rey is profoundly relieved to see him back to his playful, optimistic self.

‘Takes more than a saber to the spine to keep this bad boy down, hey?’ Poe smiles down at Finn from where he is perched on the edge of the hospital bed, and then turns to Rey. ‘How long you down for?’

‘Another day or so. It’s not a good idea to draw attention to Ahch-To by flying back and forth. And I still need to work on sparring, Luke says I’m too vicious.’

‘If you were any less vicious, both of you would probably be dead and I’d be here, twiddling my thumbs,’ Poe says semi-seriously. ‘You saved Finn, not to mention the galaxy. Maybe a more, er, _passionate_ class of Jedi is exactly what the doctor ordered.’

Rey smiles wryly and repeats the sacred mantra to Poe: “ _There is no passion. There is serenity_.”

Poe snorts. ‘Bunk that. I’ll take passion wherever I can get it. Serenity is just the cherry on top.’ Rey catches his gaze flickering to Finn again as he spokes; Finn remains blissfully ignorant. Rey opens her mouth to comment –

‘Excuse me? Mistress Rey? I hope I’m not interrupting anything of importance?’ C3PO’s clipped tones echo behind her in the hospital ward.

Rey turns to face the golden protocol droid. ‘Hi, Threepio. What’s going on?’

The droid’s arm joints whirr and point in the direction of the door. ‘Princ – apologies, _General_ Organa requests your presence in her private chambers. There is an urgent matter she wishes to discuss with you. May I guide you to her quarters?’

‘Sure,’ Rey replies in mild confusion, standing up and adjusting the leather satchel over her shoulder. ‘I’ll see you again later, Finn. Take care. You too, Poe.’

She walks out of the hospital wing with Threepio, who keeps her amused with inane comments about the currently unclassified reconnaissance missions the Resistance had been making around the Core Planets. Before Rey knows it, they’ve arrived at Leia’s door. She knocks, and after listening for Leia’s faint reply, she opens the door.

The general is sitting at a small trestle table, sheets of star-maps and navigational charts spread before her, a pencil between her teeth. She crooks a finger toward Rey, who takes a seat at the opposite end of the table, and circles a small planetary system on one of the sheets, then raises her tired eyes to meet Rey’s inquisitive ones.

‘Rey. Good evening. How are you?’

‘I’m well, General. And you?’ Rey can’t keep a puzzled frown from forming.

‘I expect you’re wondering why you’re here. It’s no matter, really. I’ve just received a report on some active security droids that our intelligence has picked up. These sorts of robots were outlawed by the council aeons ago, and if they truly are in operation we need them to be neutralized. And fast. She appraises her brother’s new apprentice. ‘I require a skilled pilot to fly to a system called Felucia on the Outer Rim, where the alert has been traced to. According to reconnaissance, there are only a few active droids, and I know you’re here for a break, but… would you be interested in helping out?’

Rey’s frown deepens. ‘General, thank you for thinking of me, and I would love the chance to fly out to the Rim. But I am no fighter –‘

‘As I recall, you single-handedly took on the First Knight of Ren and won,’ Leia interrupts, a hard expression on her face, refusing to refer to Kylo Ren as her flesh and blood. ‘I think you are _quite_ the fighter, Rey. And you wouldn’t be going alone. I would have Chewbacca and the astromech droid fly with you.’

Rey can’t tell whether Leia is admiring her or accusing her of hurting her son. She is sensitive to these things, and has a lingering feeling that Leia is holding something back from the conversation, but she doesn’t dare probe with the Force. The General is Force-sensitive too.

Leia deliberately softens her demeanour. ‘Please, Rey,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m asking as a friend as well as your leader. It is… crucial to me that _you_ complete this mission.’

 _OK, there’s definitely something suspicious here._ But Rey knows she can’t refuse a direct order, and so she nods. ‘I will complete the objective for you, General. With a thorough check, I can have the Falcon fly out in two hours.’

‘No need. I’ve already had some specialists look it over. Time is of the essence.’

And with that, Leia stands and walks out of the room, leaving Rey at the general’s table with a handful of star charts and eyebrows about to fly off her face.

\--

Chewie growls softly as he eases his bulk into the copilot’s seat, and Rey nods.

‘I know it’s weird. But she asked for us especially. And it’s nice to be acknowledged.’

Chewie roars his agreement, and BB8 whistles appreciatively. The last of the sustainable provisions are loaded onto the Falcon, and they receive the signal to take off. Rey and Chewie labour over their respective sections of the flight controls for a minute, and then the Falcon is rising smoothly into the air, breaking atmo and shooting off into the realms of space, their base planet just a small ball behind them.

She regrets that she hadn’t had the time to say goodbye to Finn, but the general had assured her that the mission wouldn’t take long – battle droids are notoriously stupid - and besides, it will be a good chance for her to hone her piloting skills again. Flying is her first love, even if training to be a Jedi Knight has recently taken priority.

‘I don’t know whether there are many hyperspace channels in that part of the Outer Rim, Chewie. We can use the channels from here to the Core Systems, but after that we’ll have to play it by ear. Ready?’

Chewie growls again, and they push the ship into hyperdrive, the previously defined stars and planets dissolving into abstract streaks of light. She begins configuring the coordinates they need to fly in order to reach Felucia in a decent amount of time.

She’s been given bare-bones info about the planet by C3PO, purveyor of all mundane facts: it is a tropical jungle planet in the Tion sector, colonized by Ithorians but populated by a type of sentient amphibian known as the Felucians. The Gossam Couriver pioneers, whoever they are, had discovered it back in 27000 BBY, and the planet had fallen victim to various militaristic occupations ever since, only recently becoming sovereign again. That probably has something to do with the fact that it is difficult to get to; maneuvering around an unstable asteroid belt is daunting for the most seasoned pilots, and according to old intel the planet is overrun with hostile flora and fauna.

She presses the final remaining buttons and stands up, sighing and stretching cramped neck muscles. ‘We won’t need to do anything else for the next hour or so, Chewie – any suggestions for boredom relief?’

Chewie roars excitedly.

‘Dejarik? Really?’ Rey says skeptically. ‘You’d have to teach me how to play.’

Chewie roars again.

‘If you say so.’

Rey fishes through one of their provision crates and pulls out two ration packs – a painful reminder of an indentured life on Jakku. She grabs some water cans and two bowls and quickly mixes the ration powder into the water, creating two fluffy loaves of bread. She splits the little green power-blocks between the bowls and carries them over to the holo-board that Dejarik is played on.

Chewie growls, indicating that she should choose first.

‘Uhhh… the freaky muscly one. He’ll beat up everyone else, right?’

Under all that ruglike fur, it looked like Chewie rolls his eyes.

‘I can already tell I’m going to loathe this game.’

\--

Two and a half hours later, and they’re drawing perilously close to the asteroid belt surrounding Felucia. Pumped full of adrenaline, Rey practically vibrates at the controls as she fixes up various angles and speeds. If gravity sucker-punches them too hard and fast, they’ll surely be pulled into the path of an asteroid or worse, but at the same time they can’t go faster than a snail’s crawl through the belt in case they crash headlong into floating space chunks.

Rey nudges the Falcon forward, easing around a cluster of glowing celestial rocks, straightening up and trying to breathe through tightly clenched teeth. She knows dimly that Chewbacca is at the helm beside her, but she will feel personally responsible if they damage the Millennium Falcon. It’s all that remains of Han Solo’s legacy. _Well, the Falcon and_ Kylo Ren.

Thinking his name stirs up a flurry of emotions and pictures for Rey, feelings and memories she doesn’t particularly want to resurface. The mixing ultraviolet colour of their lightsabers as they clash again and again. The crippling fear as the black-cloaked figure advances on her. The rage she feels as she beats him back, stroke after stroke, and the urge she has to end his life when he lays defenseless at her feet. And worst of all, the unsettling connection she feels with him when he forcefully enters her mind, that energy they’d recognised in eachother, as though they are destined to –

 _Stop_. Kylo Ren – _Ben Solo_ , she reminds herself - is a heartless monster, his mother’s worst nightmare. He’d casually ordered the deaths of thousands of innocents; slaughtered a handful of Padawans under the cover of night; had tried and almost succeeded in killing Finn and herself. _He killed his own father._

And yet… despite the revulsion and dislike Rey feels for him – dislike, because Jedi are not permitted to hate – there is also a swirl of pity. As much as the knight denied it to himself, he was conflicted. Rey has glimpsed into his mind, felt the turmoil of his inner thoughts and the crippling self-doubt he wears like a shroud. It still nags at her that he’d asked her to be his apprentice – the very idea of it insults her, but she knows – _or at least thinks_ \- the request had come from a place of deep loneliness.

And so, she feels sorry. In the same way she’d felt sorry for the ripper-raptor that had bitten a child on Jakku, and had been trampled to death as a result. Just sorry. Nothing else.

Rey cuts off that train of thought with a shake of her head, and returns her attention to the Falcon’s controls. A quick reading indicates that they are less than two lightyears from Felucia – but one of those two lightyears is choked with asteroid debris. She grits her teeth and urges the ship forward, acting on instinct and casting out with the Force to get a better scope of their surroundings. Ever so slowly, the ship inches forward, metalloid walls trembling as Rey steers this way and that, avoiding the minefield. Time slows to the point of oozing past, each second thick with anxiety.

At last, when every nerve has been frayed to a string, they’ve made it through and Rey can safely program the ship into hyperdrive for the last leg of the voyage. Chewie thumps her on the shoulder and she lets out a peal of relieved laughter. ‘Thank the stars that’s over.’

 

 

__________________________________

Source for this chapter:

[Felucia and the Felucians!](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Felucia/Legends) 


	3. Paradise Lost

The colours of the stars, planetary bodies and nebulae quietly mix into a glittering mass as the ship hurtles through the heavens. Beside the window, the figure of a young woman can be seen, her chin to her chest as she sleeps in the pilot’s chair.

_She is dreaming about flying – flying with Han Solo to a planet teeming with green and water and life. He’s hinting at the possibility of a job for her aboard the Falcon and she is elated. A tiny wrinkled woman peers at her through enormous bifocals, her inquisitive mind tugging at Rey’s. There is a particularly hard tug, and the dream derails._

_Now she is running through the woods of Takodana, eyes darting every which way, pointing a blaster gun with a shaking hand as the crackling sounds of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber resonate through the forest. She starts to turn her back –_

_And he’s there! Oh god, he’s coming toward her with that hellish red saber, and she fires shot after shot until –_

_He stops in his tracks and removes that hideous mask. Once again Rey is shocked at the normality of his face; he doesn’t look inherently evil. He steps closer, bringing a gloved hand up to her face and gliding his fingers over her cheekbone, her lips._

_‘Rey…’_

_This never happened! her subconscious shrieks. Kylo pauses in his action as though he has heard the protest too. He smiles then, and it is heartbreakingly lovely and completely malevolent._

_And he thrusts the saber blade through her side._

_Rey screams – and the dream changes again, scenery morphing from rain-drenched woods to a nighttime jungle of pink, phosphorescent trees. The only remainder of her other dream is the pulsating ache of her side. She presses a hand to the hurt, and is confused to see that her hand is encased in a black leather glove. Frowning, she glances down at her body. That, too, is clothed completely in black. Dark Side clothes. Getting the beginnings of a notion in the pit of her stomach, she grabs a hank of her hair and tugs. Black, wavy hairs are clenched in her leather-clad fist._

**_Kylo Ren._ **

The second she thinks the name, she jerks awake.

Clarity returns to her. _That was no dream._

The General has sent them to Felucia under false pretenses.

Kylo Ren is here, in grave danger, and they are to be his rescuers.

 _Fantastic_.

 --

Chewie sets a mug of tea down beside Rey’s elbow. She rubs her eyes and murmurs a thankyou, lifting the mug to her lips and breathing in the heady aroma of sapir-infused water. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep again, and had kept herself awake deliberating whether to inform Chewbacca that Leia had lied to them. Eventually she had decided not to: tensions between the Wookiee and the princess were already high enough as it was; they’d never exactly been friends.

They can see Felucia outside the shuttle’s window, and they slow the Falcon down as they are sucked into the planet’s orbit, bringing their six-hour journey to a close. Rey checks the coordinates Leia has given her for their landing site – it was intended to be close to the field of battle droids, or, as Rey supposes now, Kylo Ren.

 _Ren_ and _an army of unfriendly battle droids. Just perfect._

Cumulus clouds drift past the Falcon’s screen, obscuring their view for a few moments before the clouds part and the pilots get their first sight of Felucia.

Rey gapes, Chewie roars and BB8, who has just rolled up from the sleeping quarters, emits a shrill whistle.

Floating like apparitions out of the cloudbank are countless mountain peaks, from tiny to titanic, peppered with odd, glowing cyan-coloured trees, tethered to eachother by the strings of tattered vines. Banners of mist curl and uncurl around the base of the largest landmasses, and while they stare at the colossal sight, a flock of enormous reptilian birds takes flight from an enormous tree and bullet towards the Falcon. Flashes of poisonous green and vivid teal flit past their windows, and Rey ducks instinctively as a cruel beak taps against the window above their control panel.

Chewie keeps the ship cruising straight, bypassing the rest of the isles in favour of a wide expanse of forest. A forest with a thicket of strangely pink trees at its centre. And the scattered rubble of a space shuttle, wings bent perpendicular to the ground.

 _Ren_.

‘We land here,’ Rey says decisively, organizing the Falcon’s landing plan.

Chewie growls, bemused, but he moves aside and lets her program the rest of the starship’s systems. They begin a slow descent into a clearing near the centre of the forest, trees bending and fallen leaves forming a cyclone as the Falcon’s thrusters whip the air.

They touch down smoothly, and Rey turns to Chewbacca. ‘I need you and BB8 to stay here and guard the ship, okay? There could be looters on this planet.’

Chewie grunts in disbelief, but acquiesces. He seems to think that she’s too idiotic to bother arguing with. _Good_. Rey strides down the ramp and into the underwood, noticing immediately that there’s something different, something _pure_ about the energy of this planet. She breathes in deeply, drawing the Force into her body, feeling the light tingling at her fingertips and toes, making her giggle.

_There is so much light here._

Some of the light’s inverse still hides in the shadows, though. She can sense it at the corners of her consciousness, and she zeroes in on that point of darkness. Her feet lead her to the base of an enormous tree, its radiant pink blossoms swaying in the light breeze. The tree from the dream.

There’s a rustling in the higher branches, a couple of brightly coloured birds squawking and taking wing. And then –

A dark shape is swan-diving out of the treetop, plummeting an odd thirty feet before landing with a thud on the ground in front of Rey. She would have been impressed if the shape hadn’t immediately sunk to his knees, clutching his side and gasping out a string of curse words so vile even the junk-bosses of Jakku wouldn’t have dared to utter them.

A small part of her had hoped that the dream she’d had was just her subconscious playing tricks; that Leia’s cover story about the battle droids had been true. But here he is, Kylo Ren – _Jedi Killer, murderer of Han Solo and countless others, apprentice Sith_ – kneeling in front of her, head bowed.

She recovers herself, pulling out the blue lightsaber but holding off on igniting it. ‘Quite the theatrical entrance, Ren. Don’t strain yourself on my account, though.’

Her enemy shakes the tangled curls out of his eyes and glances up at her. His face creases into such a dreadful scowl that Rey breaks eye contact.

‘Is this a _joke_?’ Ren hisses from between clenched teeth, still holding his injured side. ‘I summon the Supreme Leader and he sends me the damned _scavenger_?’

Rey shrugs. ‘You must be out of favour. Wouldn’t be anything to do with being beaten up by a girl, would it?’

Ren groans in response, not bothering to reply. He looks horrendous: his pretty lips had a corpse-blue tint to them, the rest of his skin dry and greyish, and there is a large, stiff patch of dried and drying blood on his black cloak. His eyes are glassy and keep closing involuntarily.

 _You could watch him die here. First class entertainment,_ that niggling voice from Starkiller Base returns, trying to tempt her. And it _is_ tempting, for a moment.

 _But I am not him,_ Rey asserts. And she sticks out a hand.

‘Well?’ she says. ‘Are you going to save yourself, or am I going to have to do it for you?’

Ren glares up at her, mouth twisted as though he’s just sucked a lemon. ‘Put your hand away. I need help from you like I need a hole in the head. But we’ve already done that, haven’t we?’

He motions weakly to the jagged scar that runs down his face from widow’s peak to pointed chin. It has faded slightly over time, but is still mauve and angry-looking against the pallor of his skin.

‘That’s nasty,’ Rey notes, trying to act like she isn’t admiring her handiwork. ‘But really. Whatever shot you with that blaster could still be roaming round, and you’re not getting out of these woods alone.’

She holds out her hand again. Ren blinks at her.

‘I haven’t got all damned day, Ren. _Take my hand_ ,’ Rey grinds out.

‘Fine,’ Kylo snaps suddenly, snatching it and gripping it weakly. ‘But this changes nothing, scavenger. You would kill me the second you were incited to, and I you.’

Rey rolls her eyes at his posturing and heaves him to his feet, and he sways where he stands like the drunkards in seedy establishments back on Jakku, or any other planet with spirits, for that matter. He has to sling an armor-clad arm around Rey for balance, and her knees nearly buckle under the weight of him. With great effort, she moves in the direction of the Falcon, Ren struggling to put one foot in front of the other, gasping a little but otherwise stoic and silent.

Rey turns her attention to the scenery as they painstakingly pick their way through the forest. It is late afternoon, she guesses by the deepening heat and the lazy calls of tropical birds in the trees. The pink trees are interesting, scientifically and spiritually, and Rey closes her eyes briefly, probing at the energy around the trees. They hum with the Light, radiating peaceful energy out from each petal into the air. She drinks in the tranquility, and feels calmed instantly.

They step into the clearing where she parked the Falcon, and the calm melts. ‘ _No, no, no!_ ’

She darts out from under Kylo’s arm, leaving him unbalanced. He falls flat on his face in the grass, but she doesn’t turn around as she sprints for the other shape lying horizontal near the ship’s ramp.

Rey rolls an unconscious Chewie onto his back, spotting the dart sticking out of his neck. She plucks it out and sniffs the tip – some kind of crude sedative. The dart is tied with feathers from the jewel-bright birds she’d seen in the forest before.

_No droid could have done this._

_This means sentient creatures with weapons._

_Sentient creatures with weapons that bested Chewbacca in fight._

She leaves Chewie on his back and runs up the Falcon’s ramp. A quick inventory check confirms the worst: whoever had attacked Chewie has also raided their ship, taking their hyperdrive system controller, subspace radio, and has ripped various crucial buttons and wires from their control panel.

Blind panic overtakes her for a moment, and she forces it back. _Concentrate_. _Breathe_.

Life on Jakku was all about overcoming obstacles, and she’d survived a decade there through rational thought and a touch of improvisation. This is no different.

_Sure, except you’re stranded on a hostile planet with the monster who killed Han Solo. There’s just that one slight issue._

Remembering that she had left Kylo Ren and Chewbacca lying in the dirt outside, Rey rushes down the platform again, calling to BB8, wherever he is, the little coward, to help her. The astromech droid rolls out of the ship, squeaking his alarm in a series of beeps and whistles.

‘Yes, yes, I _know_ , BB8, I saw what they did to the ship. Help me get these two inside, will you? We’re taking them to the med bay.’

Together, they drag Chewie’s immense bulk up the ramp and into the tiny, ill-equipped medical bay, then return for Kylo Ren, who is out cold, white as a sheet. Rey hopes he won’t remember her dropping him when he awakes, or there’ll be hell to pay.

She and BB8 lay him down on one of the small stretcher-beds, and Rey fishes through the drawers for some bacta ointment. She takes out the small jar and, grimacing, starts to lift Ren’s black robe. BB8 whistles questioningly.

‘I _have_ to,’ Rey hisses, her cheeks flushing peony. ‘If we don’t treat that blaster wound he’s going to get infected or die.’ She slips the robe off his limp arm and started to peel back the stiff layers of armour and cloth he wears, gagging at the rusty smell of the blood. At last she’s made it to his undershirt, and she strips it back to reveal the wound: an angry, deep laceration that leaks dark blood in slow, languid _drip-drips_. There isn’t much left to bleed, Rey realizes. He’d already bought himself extra time through use of the Force, but he was too weak now. Ren is going to die.

She unscrews the bacta jar, digs her fingers into the clear gel and glops the foul-smelling substance onto the skin around the wound, which bubbles and fizzes instantaneously.

It isn’t enough. The hole still weeps, refusing to shrink. Rey feels the blackness of panic engulf her again – he’s a monster, and there is nobody in the galaxy who deserves death more. But not when she’s been sent to save him.

She closes her eyes and lets the light of the Force flow through her, into her, filling her heart and mind with serenity. And then her Master’s voice comes to her on a wavelength.

_Use the Force, my Padawan. Heal him with your Light. You know what to do._

_I don’t!_ She shouts silently. _You never taught me how!_

But there was no response, and time is running out. So with a grunt of resignation, Rey places her hands firmly over the open wound, and _breathes_.

With each inhale, she envisions the Light sinking into her soul, like a cup being filled to the verge of overflow. She feels it warm her blood and float like golden glitter in her lungs. And she focuses on Kylo’s white face as she murmurs:

_This blood will cease to flow. This flesh will repair itself, the skin returning to smoothness. The blood will replenish. The wound will disappear entirely._

_Please_ , she adds as an afterthought, trying to imagine her fingertips leaking light energy into Kylo’s stiff body. She forces herself to look back at the yawning hole.

There is still blood and gore staining his skin around the area. But the deep wound is gone. Rey goggles at her achievement, and then silently throws a fist into the air, though there’s nobody around to cheer for her.

Now that Ren is healed, he has to be secured. She unclips the lightsaber from his belt, then leaves the med bay and grabs a length of rope from their arsenal, bringing it back and looping it around Ren’s wrists, legs and stomach in a complicated sequence of knots, effectively binding him to the stretcher. She ties the last knot and steps back.

At that moment, Ren’s lips part. His face relaxes from its death rictus, and he breathes something that could have been a name or a sigh.


	4. Dream On, Dreamer

_He is dreaming in technicolour, floating through a spectrum of images both past and present. He sees pristine snow atop a black outcropping of rock at Starkiller Base. The slaughter of the Padawans at his uncle’s Jedi temple, and the crackling red of his lightsaber. He sees himself confronting the scavenger, the girl, on the forest planet, and carrying her like a kidnapped bride into his command shuttle. He stares down from above as that same girl half-carries him through a different forest, feels her hands on his skin as she strips him of his clothing._

_He stirs, restless, and the dreamscape distorts._

_Now he is the one removing his clothes, and the girl is completely naked already, her entire body bared to him, for him – neat, small breasts that swell over a tiny waist, narrow hips and slim, bronze legs. They are standing underneath the trailing branches of a tree, bioluminescent pink in the darkness, casting a soft rose light over their bodies. The branches sway in a soft breeze, and a bunch of blossoms blow loose from a branch, twisting down on the air currents and landing on the girl’s hair and shoulders._

_He slips off his underclothes, and the girl raises a delicate hand and rests it on his cheek. She doesn’t speak, but she doesn’t need to. Somehow, she conveys her thoughts directly to him._

_He pulls her flush against him, drinking in the heat of her, the smell of her hair. She caresses his arms, and he feels it so intensely that it’s almost as if he is both touching and being touched. He can feel himself hardening against her, and the girl presses her lips against the divot of his collarbone, breathing his name. Oh, God._

_He can’t hold himself back; he kisses her with an uncontrolled fury. She moves a hand downward to touch him there, and then she is pushing him back onto the ground and sinking down on top of him, around him, moving in ways he has never known existed before. Petals from the tree glide down onto their entwined bodies._

_Every shift and slide sends aftershocks of pleasure through his core. With each swirl of her hips she drives him further into her, and he flings his head back so hard that –_

He wakes up. There’s a pounding pain at the back of his skull, a throbbing in his groin, and he thinks with a stab of dismay that he might have come in his underwear. He tries to sit up and check, but something holds him down. He turns his head – thick cords of rope are wrapped round his wrists.

Of course she’d tied him down.

He lets his head fall back onto the table with a thunk, growling in frustration. Tied to a bed, still half-hard, unable to clean up the evidence of his first wet dream since he was twelve.

Meanwhile, in the pilot’s quarters, Rey jolts into wakefulness, blushing from her forehead to her chest with embarrassment, images of strong hands and hard kisses and the texture of curly, silken hair woven through her fingers still lingering in her mind. Disgust etches every detail of her face.

_What the?_

 --

A couple of hours later, Chewie startles Rey as she sits at what remains of the Falcon’s control panel, one of Leia’s charts spread over the dashboard, scribbling on it with a pencil. He puts a paw on her shoulder and she jumps, face flushing with a mix of surprise and shame, sure that the sticky residue of _that_ dream is all over her, too easy to read.

‘Chewie!’ She leaps up and embraces him, hiding her flaming face in his carpetlike fur. ‘Thank the gods you’re awake; I’ve been useless without you. I’ve been trying to work out a plan-‘

Chewie roars sorrowfully, shaking his head.

‘Oh, don’t say that. What were you going to do, scry into the future and see the attack coming? If anyone was going to do that, it’d be me,’ Rey comforts him, unwinding her arms and guiding Chewie over to the sketches she’s made. ‘We can’t get the ship in the air without the parts they stole, and I don’t have the skills to wire a new comm-system and get a message to the Resistance. So unless we want to be stranded on this planet for the considerable future, our best bet is probably finding the thieves and stealing our stuff back?’ She speaks the last sentence like a question, and Chewie frowns thoughtfully before a small smile plays at the corners of his black, rubbery lips. He rumbles softly.

Rey feels the beginnings of tears welling up. ‘Yeah. Just like Han. He stole the Falcon back from me, so we can steal its parts back from them.’ She sniffles slightly. ‘Do you miss him terribly, Chewie?’

The Wookiee inclines his head, sadness evident in his movements even under all the wiry hair.

‘Me too. But he died saving the galaxy. I think he’s probably bragging about that, wherever he is.’

Chewie laughs at that, peering over her shoulder to assess the rough game plan she’d drawn up. He nods his approval, then asks a question, gesturing towards the med bay.

‘Oh, him?’ Rey blusters. ‘Don’t worry about him; he’s in full restraints.’ She changes the subject. ‘At this point I’m more worried about the thieves returning. But as long as one of us stays here and guards the ship, we’re fine to explore.’

Chewie nods again, taking his bowcaster out of its storage space and slinging it over his shoulder, indicating that he’ll take the first shift.

Rey grins. ‘They won’t fool you twice, huh? OK, I’m gone.’

She gathers up the charts and takes her mini-blaster out from the arsenal. She pauses, shakes her head, reaches back in and grabs her quarterstaff too. Walking towards the ramp, she spins on her heel and throws back to Chewie: ‘Maybe check on him in an hour?’

And with that, she’s gone.

 --

Kylo Ren has been staring at the ceiling of the med bay for an age. His wrists are itching from the ropes, and he’s so thirsty that the thought of drinking his own urine has almost become a rational idea.

Now there are footsteps headed towards the bay. He swiftly closes his eyes, resettles himself on the stretcher and feigns sleep. The footsteps stop beside his makeshift bed. Then something barks.

Kylo’s eyes fly open to the blunt head of a bowcaster bolt, shoved perilously close to his face. His gaze travels up the bolt to bowcaster mechanism, and the hairy paw that holds the trigger. He swallows, and adopts a careless expression.

‘Is anyone else getting a sense of déjà vu?’ he drawls, meeting Chewbacca’s stony eyes.

Chewbacca roars.

‘You know perfectly well that I was never fluent in Shyriiwook,’ Ren replies, bored. ‘I don’t see the point of threatening me with that contraption after your friend went to so much effort to keep me alive. Leave.’

 --

Chewbacca is red-hot with hatred.

He stares at the face of the boy he’d carried round on his shoulders, pretending to be a horse for hours on end. The Ben Solo that had giggled when he was tickled and cried when the lights were turned off at night. Who was so loved by everyone he met – the prince, the galaxy’s hope, the Light.

This awful human looks so much like that innocent little boy still. But every memory is tarnished by that one moment: the moment that Ben had driven his lightsaber through his father’s back. Chewie can never forget it, not even if he lives for several thousand years.

He wants to fire the bowcaster into Ben’s arrogant face. But if he searches his feelings, he knows that that would be doing his best friend a dishonor. And so he stomps from the med bay, fills up a mug with water, brings it back to the bay, and unbinds one of Ben’s wrists.

 --

So the Wookiee had done him a kindness. That means next to nothing to Kylo Ren. He expects such sentimentality from his former family members. What is more out of character is Rey’s Force-healing of him. He knows she has used the Force because when he’d lifted his shirt to inspect the wound, his skin had been unmarred, even the months-old scar from the bowcaster bolt healed.

She’s powerful, the scavenger, and it infuriates him. Now she had saved his life, which meant by all accounts that he was indebted to her. Indebted, and a prisoner on this starship for gods knew how long, all due to his inability to send a proper message to his master.

He presses his nails hard into the skin over his ribs and scratches upwards, relishing the pain for a moment, helping him to channel the Dark side and remember who he is. And who he isn’t: a weak creature with base desires who would dream about sex instead of the goals he’s been working towards since he was a feeble teen.

He drains the water the Wookiee had brought him and, rejuvenated, lets his mind wander, reaching out to the Force again. He tries to seek out what little darkness he’d experienced before, but he finds that unlike on Starkiller or Moraband, here it is difficult to resist the pull to the Light. And suddenly the probe of his mind snags on something and he is sucked into an alternate consciousness.

Inexplicably, he is seeing beyond the walls and hearing thoughts in his head that are not his own. He has read the minds of others before, but not like this. _Never like this._

He can see blue skies, marshmallow clouds and those goddamn pink trees again. And he can hear her: Rey’s voice is reverberating through his brain as distinctly as if she were speaking directly into his ear.

_There’s so much beauty here. And it’s completely untouched._

He feels a thrill of wonder that doesn’t belong to him as she climbs one of the pink trees for a better vantage point, scouting out the forest for something.

_If you can find their stronghold, you can take back what they stole, and we can get the old thing off the ground again. Then the General can take Ren off our hands-_

He wrenches himself out of her head, severing the connection. So, he surmises, his mother had somehow intercepted the message he’d intended for Snoke, and sent the girl to retrieve him. That’s bad enough, but he is more preoccupied with the fact that he’d been hearing Rey’s thoughts without actively trying to.

He digs his nails into his side again, harder, leaving little crescent moons on the skin. He tries to focus, to think objectively about his teachings from both Jedi and Sith, all that he’s learned, and has yet to learn, about the ways of the Force.

And the knowledge comes back to him. He had been so young when his uncle had told that story, but his recollection is sharp as diamond.

_‘That’s enough, Ben. You’ll burn yourself out.’_

_The ten-year old boy scowls ferociously and concentrates again. He starts to shake with the effort. Finally, the large boulder that he is pointing at starts to shift, then cracks in two with a sound like thunder. His uncle raises his eyebrows in half appreciation, half disapproval._

_The boy drops his arm to his side, breathing heavily, his brow furrowed._

_His uncle and Master puts an arm round his shoulder and guides him off the training field. They walk together back to the Jedi Master’s sleeping quarters, where his uncle bids him sit on a stool while he makes a pot of cocoa._

_‘Master?’ the boy pipes up from the stool. ‘I did what you asked. I cracked the rock. It was too easy, though. You’re not going to make me fight_ rocks _forever, are you? I thought the Jedi were all-powerful?’_

_His uncle is quiet for a moment, stirring the cocoa on the stove. Then:_

_‘Ben, I’m going to explain something to you, and I want you to remember it. It has relevance to your training and your relationship to me as Master and Padawan. Okay?’_

_‘Yes, uncle Luke.’_

_‘It’s Master Luke, Ben,’ his uncle corrects gently, reaching over to ruffle his nephew’s hair all the same. ‘The story I want to tell you is about the bonds between masters and apprentices, and how it can help the Jedi to achieve greater feats in battle.’_

_‘There is a phenomenon known as a Force bond, which can form between Force-sensitive beings and allow them to influence eachother’s thoughts, feelings and powers. Generally, the closer a master and his Padawan are, the stronger the bond will become. However, a bond can also form outside the master and Padawan relationship in rare circumstances. There was one such case in history, when a Jedi knight saved the life of a Sith lord and formed an incredibly powerful bond with him. In other cases, very powerful Sith lords have been able to reach out and infiltrate the minds of Force-sensitives, forming and consuming connections with vulnerable people.’_

_‘I tell you this to warn you, Ben. The Jedi are not all-powerful, and nor are the Sith. But when we stand united, bonded together or otherwise, we are a force that can shake the earth. And I have worried recently that you do not stand with me._

_There is a conflict I sense in you….’_

Kylo pinches himself with his free hand, cutting off the memory. That boy, that man, that _name_ no longer exists. Ben Solo had been destroyed when Kylo Ren usurped him in the blackness of rebirth, his ascension into the First Order made easy by the lack of his former identity. And Skywalker, that weak fool – his counsel had meant nothing in the end. The Sith are exponentially more powerful than the Jedi, and once fully trained, he is destined to be more powerful than even Darth Vader. Supreme Leader Snoke has foreseen it, reassures him of it in his moments of weakness. He and Snoke have been drawing close to a Force bond themselves. Connected, they would have been godlike.

And once again, Rey has ruined everything for him.


	5. Escapism

Rey returns to the Falcon at dusk, greeting a relieved Chewie and BB8 before settling down at the dashboard to map out her path from memory. She sketches on the back of one of the General’s sheets until Chewie retires for the night, then grabs a package of nutri-shakes from a supply crate and expertly mixes them with water. She pours a mug for herself, then hesitates.

It chafes at her to share their precious rations with Kylo Ren of all people, especially since they don’t know how long it will be before they can leave Felucia. They could run out of food.

But then, they can’t exactly let him starve to death. So she pours him a mug too. She may or may not have accidentally coughed into it.

She brings the mug into the med-bay. ‘Here you g-‘

The ropes are slackened, draped over an empty stretcher.

Rey spins around and shrieks, slopping the mug of nutri-shake over her front. Kylo Ren has been standing silently next to the doorway behind her; turning has brought them face to chest, her nose a centimetre from his cloak.

His dark eyes travel down to the mess of nutri-shake on her chest. One eyebrow quirks. ‘That’s a little desperate, even for you.’

‘Hilarious,’ Rey snaps back. ‘Maybe next time, don’t sneak up on people who could have a lightsaber instead of a drink in their hand. How did you get out?’

Kylo moves past her, to the window of the bay, peering out into the foreign jungle. ‘Far too easily for my liking. But that doesn’t matter. Did you find what you were looking for?’ He gestures towards the window, to the shrieking cacophony of wild animals and birds that can be heard even inside the shuttle.

‘I don’t intend to share any details of this mission with you,’ she replies coolly. ‘Consider yourself lucky we took you on-board at all.’

‘I never asked you to,’ he simmers, stalking over to her. ‘You act as if I should be _grateful_ to be cloistered in my idiot father’s spaceship with his carpetbag and an enemy of the First Order. As if the act of saving my life erased any of the enmity between us.’

‘Careful what you say, _Ben_ ,’ Rey says, eyes narrowed. ‘Unless you’d like another scar to match the one on your face.’

Ren’s arm shoots up, hand squeezing the air. Rey squeaks as her windpipe suddenly constricts, cutting off her air supply as efficiently as a noose round the neck.

Ren’s face is twisted into an ugly, unrecognizable mask of anger. ‘Don’t call me that name again. I _will_ kill you. With or without my lightsaber.’

He releases the hold he had over her, and the breath rushes back into her lungs, making her dizzy. But Rey isn’t done yet. ‘Right. Because you’ve done a bang-up job of trying to kill me so far. Excuse me if I take that threat lightly. And if you do space me, who do you expect to fly you off Felucia and back to civilization? Chewie? After what you did to Han, he’s not in a hurry to do you any favours, I assure you.’

‘Han Solo was a fool and a crook,’ Kylo Ren sneers, bringing his face very close to Rey’s. ‘His death was necessary, and he deserved every second of it.’

Rey tries to match his intensity, but can feel tears beginning to star her lashes. ‘Your parents are _good people,_ Ren. Han was a _great man_. And you’re a demon. I regret sparing your life.’

‘Good. Then we are at an impasse. Give me back my lightsaber, and I will leave peacefully. I promise you that.’ He holds out his hand for it.

Rey shakes her head. ‘Not today. And you can stop kidding yourself that you’re going to leave, too. We both know if the Falcon departs without you, you’ll be trapped here for eternity. That brings _me_ happiness, but you? You don’t seem like the scavenger type, Kylo Ren.’

She gazes at him with a fierce determination, and Kylo is forced to re-evaluate her. She has changed much since their introduction on Starkiller Base. She’s still small of stature and doe-eyed, but steely now, hardened by training and jaded by experience in the interlude between their meetings. He casts his eyes up and down her, examining. This is no longer the ignorant scavenger that had been as surprised as he had been to discover her Force abilities. She is a force to be reckoned with, and she knows it, it’s inherent in the way she carries herself.

If he’d been in possession of his lightsaber, he could have dueled her. But as much as he hates to admit it, he does need her. He can’t kill her, he needs a pilot. Force, what a mess he’s made.

He calms himself, swallows his pride. ‘If we are truly at a stalemate, then I suppose a truce could be made. Temporarily.’

Rey eyes him warily. ‘And what would that entail?’

‘You will not attempt to keep me prisoner in this ship again. I will not try to execute you or any other crew members. You will share the details of this mission with me, and in exchange I will help you get off this godforsaken planet. Then you can fly me to the nearest inhabited system so I can acquire my own ship and return to the First Order.’

Rey doesn’t take her eyes off him as she thinks it over. Can she trust him? He double-crossed Luke, why should she believe he won’t do the same or worse to them?

‘Fine. But I’m not giving you your lightsaber.’ Rey concedes, crossing her arms.

Kylo scowls. ‘Fine.’

‘If you have any vestiges of honour left, you won’t kill me in my sleep. Get some rest. I’ll brief you in the morning.’ And with a last lingering look of mistrust, Rey leaves the med bay.

Kylo lowers himself back onto the stretcher, throwing the ropes onto the floor in a fit of temper. He can’t get comfortable on the tiny bed, and he is plagued with concern about his Supreme Leader Snoke, the First Order and his lightsaber, respectively. He can do nothing about the first two, but the third might be manageable. He experimentally raises a hand, casts out for the darkness in the Force, and tries to summon his saber to him.

There is a loud rattle and bang from somewhere on board the Falcon, but his hand remains empty and after a second he hears Rey’s angry shout: ‘Leave it alone!’

 _So this is how it has to be._ Very well. He doesn’t need his saber to kill the girl. Bonded or not, she is still a hindrance to the First Order, and a personal thorn in his side. He will help the scavenger complete her mission, and once she’d flown him to safety, he will dispose of her.

He lies down on the stretcher, smiling to himself, and is asleep in minutes.

 --

Rey lies awake inside the pilot’s quarters. Sleep is an unmanageable feat when your enemy is on board your vessel, possibly plotting to kill you. And Rey _knows_ that he is, that the truce is flimsy as a spiderweb to him. She can’t explain it, but the same part of her that had sensed his presence from the air above Felucia now warns her of his homicidal thoughts. She can’t read them directly, Ren has erected walls in his mind ever since she’d read his mind on Starkiller, but every few minutes there are faint, fleeting ripples in her mind that don’t belong to her, as though she can pick up the frequency of his emotions, but not tune in.

At least he hasn’t been able to summon his lightsaber; she has that tiny edge over him. But then again, he’d Force-choked her as easily as he would have swatted a mosquito. She rubs her neck, grimacing at the fresh memory of his eyes, black as volcanic glass, intense and full of hatred for her.

She feels the tide of Ren’s feelings ebb and flow again, and, too tired to puzzle out what her transient connection to him means, she closes her eyes and slips into a thankfully dreamless sleep.

\-- 

Dawn breaks on Felucia like the egg of a Panna bird, the sun spilling itself like a yolk over the watercolour horizon. Light strikes gold in Rey’s eyelashes as she blinks sleepily at her hastily drawn map of yesterday’s trek. She yawns, and flips the page over just as Kylo Ren enters the command deck, quietly instead of with his usual authoritative, stamping stride. He’s making an effort.

‘Morning?’ She’d intended it to sound more like a greeting.

‘Hardly,’ Ren replies emotionlessly, his back to her as he fiddles with the supply crates at the back of the storage cupboard. He’s still clad in his layers of black, with his cowl covering his hair, but he hasn’t worn the helmet since she found him in the forest. That’s a good sign.

He keeps his body turned away from her as he unscrews a bottle of water and emptied it over the contents of a ration pack. The sight of _Kylo Ren_ of all people, in full Knight of Ren garb no less, making breakfast in the kitchen of the _Millenium Falcon_ is so absurd that she had to bite her fist to stop a giggle.

He turns around and joins her at the command deck’s only table, placing a rehydrated energy pudding to the side of the sketch she’d drawn.

‘Show me,’ he commands.

She wants to make an acidic retort, but the agreed truce is still weighing heavily on her conscience. So she overturns the page, tracing her path through the forest of Felucia with a finger as she starts to explain their predicament, omitting her knowledge of Leia’s rescue mission and instead going along with her battle-droid cover story.

‘… So when we landed here, I left the ship to scout the area for droids, and a band of looters overpowered Chewie while you fell at my feet out of a tree. They’ve taken my hyperdrive controller, cooling unit, switcher circuit and vital parts of the comm-link system. And that’s just what I found missing from the control panel.’

‘I can’t fly the _Falcon_ without a hyperdrive or a cooling system – the lack of moderation would blow up the ship before we’d made it out of Felucia gravitational system – so our best bet at this point is to find the thieves and ask for our stuff back.’

Her statement is met with a humourless laugh from Ren.

‘ _Ask for our stuff back_?’ he mocks, his voice overflowing with incredulity. ‘Do you have any idea how naïve you sound? This is a foreign planet, full of foreign savages with foreign customs, and you want to waltz into their territory and _ask_ them to-‘

‘Whatever. We’ll _steal_ the parts back,’ Rey interrupts. ‘The verb doesn’t matter. What we need to focus on is finding the thieves’ home and getting the heck off this planet.’

‘So now we’re thieving from the thieves. An excellent plan.’

‘Scavenger, remember?’ Rey jabs a thumb towards her chest. ‘And it would be pretty darn great if you could stop shooting down every suggestion I make. I’m the captain here, I’ve got the lightsaber, and I hold all the cards. You’re just along for the ride, and things are complicated enough as it is without your constant interjections. Okay?’

Maddeningly, Ren chooses not to respond.

‘I’ll take that as a yes. Make yourself ready; we leave in half an hour.’

She leaves the booth with a haughty air, and once again she feels a flare of Ren’s irritation bloom like a snapdragon in the corner of her mind. She feels his emotions more strongly as she takes both her own lightsaber and his from their storage spaces, clipping them to her utility belt. _Safety first._

 


	6. Intrepid

Kylo follows her out of the freighter, ignoring the chirruping of the annoying ball she calls BB-8. The horizon is still tinged with tangerine and yellow from the sunrise, but they’re starting the trek now in case the humidity she predicted later sapped their energy.

The grimy beige rags she wears shift as she descends the ramp, and he spies his lightsaber, clipped to the leather sash around her hips. He grins to himself.

‘Very trusting, to put a lethal weapon in easy reach of a person who has a history of trying to kill you,’ he comments, trailing along behind her.

The scavenger shoots him a quelling look over her shoulder. ‘And what of our truce, Kylo Ren? I am not expecting you to kill me. _My_ word is my oath – can you say the same?’

He glowers in answer. ‘I could take it if I wanted,’ he mutters to himself, but quietly, a consolation.

‘Come _on_ ,’ she says snippily, marching off into the trees that enclose their landing site. He has no choice but to follow her, thinking resentfully that if he had managed to dispose of her on Starkiller, there is a very good chance that he would never have been sent to Kintan to meet with the Nikto subleaders, and thus never been shipwrecked by an asteroid and trapped here. Tracing back through events, it’s clear that everything was her fault. Snoke prefers General Hux now, because of the grave mistake Ren had made in choosing the girl over the droid back on Takodana. He is disgraced in the eyes of the Supreme Leader. It isn’t _fair_. How the hell was he meant to know she possessed Force powers that matched his own?

‘ _Are you intentionally projecting your whining? Because I can hear you from here_ ,’ the girl’s voice trills clear as a bell inside his head, startling him. He looks over to where she is, yards in front, bent over a plant with electric blue ferns.

‘Get out of my head!’ he seethes out loud, focusing on elbowing her presence out of his mind. He feels a quiver of panic shake the edges of his calm veneer: _for how long had she been able to listen in on his private thoughts?_ He isn’t even _near_ to her, as he had been when she’d penetrated his mind on Starkiller Base. Generally, he needs close proximity to be able to read the minds of his subjects. Who _is_ this girl? And will she ever stop shattering his expectations?

He sends tendrils of the Force out in her direction, invading her mind while she’s focused on the flora of the jungle around them. It is simpler than walking through an open door; it’s as though he has simply crossed a neural bridge between his brain and hers. And he is almost blinded.

The _goodness_ of her, the _light_ , thumps through his head like a bass. He can visualize her Force signature, essentially the aura of her soul: an opaline, incandescent whiteness and innocence that burns behind his eyes. He cringes, unable to withstand the manifestation of her Light. Kylo withdraws, massaging his temples, lips pursed in confusion.

The bridging of their minds has come too easily to her, and to him. Further proof that somehow, the girl has forced a connection between them that seems to be growing with each passing day. In the interrogation room, he’d sensed her Light, but it had not blinded him. And obviously, she still has no idea that this is _abnormal_. Little, uneducated dune crawler that she was.

‘What are you doing back there?’ she breaks his reverie, sounding irritated. He stomps over to where she was, adopting a brooding silence.

They trek on through the underwood for miles, brushing past vibrant ferns in shades of green and cyan, navigating hidden tree roots and slippery boulders. Kylo assesses the environment around them with a clinical detachment: just because he is incommunicado doesn’t mean that he can’t be useful to the First Order, and this planet can serve as another Death Star if the need arises. It is tropical rather than icy, though, and as they walk through a grove of lush trees bearing an unidentifiable, melon-like fruit, they are suddenly accosted by a band of monkeys: little fluffy balls of lilac fur and cheeky, inquisitive faces.

One throws a melon at Rey, who catches it deftly with one hand and sniffs at it. Another monkey tosses a piece of the fruit to Kylo, who narrowly dodges getting hit in the head, picks it up off the ground and pelts it back towards the nasty creatures. The melon misses its mark and goes bouncing off into a field of coral dervish-shaped plants.

‘Can’t you even be nice to a monkey?’ Rey bites out, holding her melon out to another beast, which has scurried down the tree to greet her.

He opens his mouth to reply, but is silenced by a deep-throated growling, coming from somewhere behind the thicket of trees.

Rey’s whole body tightens, instantly on the alert. She unfastens the two lightsabers from her belt, gripping one in each hand, making a decision. After an agonizingly long moment, she holds his out.

‘I’m trusting you,’ is all she has time to say before there comes another guttural snarl in the underbrush. He takes his lightsaber and ignites it in a whirl of yellow-red sparks, the unstable crackling of its blade echoing through the forest.

The source of the growling is getting louder and closer, and through the bond, Kylo feels Rey’s paralyzing fear, and that awakens a fury in him. He can’t be sure whether the point of origin is her inability to act, his own predicament, or just the usual directionless, passionate rage he is prone to giving in to as a Sith in training. In any case, it deserves an outlet.

He hacks at the ferns in front of them with his lightsaber, burning fronds falling to the ground, so at least whatever was hunting them will have no place to hide. He drags the blade of his sword across a nearby tree – and suddenly, there it is, a hulking behemoth camouflaged perfectly by the deep puce of the foreign plants to their right: part-panther, part serpent, part-other-beast that he didn’t have a name for.

 _Holy shit,_ he hears her inside his head, and he almost forgets the situation and laughs at the girl using such foul language. But they both sober up as the creature lets out a terrifying _hiss_ , the antennae around its powerful neck spreading out like a cobra’s hood, rattling a warning display. Its mouth gapes open, filled with serrated, knife-like teeth.

They both stare into the abyss of the animal’s eyes. The abyss stares back.

The girl breaks the stillness.

‘ _Run_!’ she screams, twisting like greased lightning on practiced feet and sprinting off in the opposite direction.

 _Don’t run_! Kylo hollers at her through the link, but she keeps fleeing. ‘Damn it!’ He brandishes his lightsaber at the approaching beast, which looks utterly unconcerned by the fiery, sputtering blade. It draws back a paw faster than he can move and swipes at the air.

Kylo throws himself out of the way, giving up on the standoff and starting to run. The creature roars behind him, crushing flora under its feet as it chases him. His head is full of buzzing and curses, and he ducks under the low branches of a tree, hoping to confuse the brute or at least slow it down. Instead, it crashes right through, muscles flexing as it launches itself into the air.

In the few frenzied seconds he has, Kylo draws from the Force and sends a blast towards the jaguar, but only serves to stop it from landing directly on him. It rolls off to the side and springs back to its feet, spitting and snarling and gnashing its teeth a centimetre from his face. In an act of absolute stupidity, he swings a fist upward and punches it on the chin.

 _Crack_! Something snaps, and for one wild second he thinks he’d broken the jaguar’s jaw. And then the shock subsides and his left hand is throbbing with pure, incandescent agony.

‘ _Fuck_!’

He howls the curse, the bones of his hand squealing horribly against eachother, fractured in two. The pain is nauseating, and it takes every iota of effort to use it to fuel his fighting technique.

He slashes the lightsaber through the air with his right hand, cutting a burning gash through the creature’s foreleg. It screeches and backs a few paces off before hurling itself at him with renewed vigour.

 _Screw this._ He races in the direction he’d seen Rey go, the bones of his broken hand grating, the beast snapping its jaws a few millimetres from his back.

The link between him and the girl suddenly bursts into life; her voice screaming at him from an incalculable distance. Pictures flash before his eyes as he runs: a cracked boulder, a tree with burnt-orange leaves, a waterfall in the distance. She is showing him the path. _Ren, run!_

He does as she commands, not caring about the implications of that in the current game of cat and mouse. He feints left and right, the creature constantly breathing down his neck, and he barely notices as he passes the boulder and the orange tree in quick succession.

Then the girl is hurtling out from behind the tree trunk, shouting something unintelligible and running pell-mell towards the overhang of a steep cliff. She doesn’t glance back as she propels herself over the edge, disappearing from sight.

Kylo dodges as the animal throws itself forward, just missing his leg but snagging the corner of his cloak in its claws. Blessedly, the fabric rips away, and he runs as hard as he can towards the edge of the precipice, flinging himself over just as the panther’s jaws crunch shut in thin air.

He glimpses the waterfall for a second, mist rising into rainbows where the water pounds on the rocks at the base of the cliff before running into a river, and then he plunges into the water.

The whirlpool at the base of the waterfall is strong, and he gets carried backward towards the deadly rocks faster than he can catch his breath from the dizzying drop and the impact he’d made with the water. He stretches out his good hand feebly and manages to grab onto a handful of reeds in the center of the river.

 _Where are you_? he yells at the girl over the deadened link. His arm feels like it’s about to be wrenched from its socket as the current pulls at him with greedy fingers.

There is radio silence for a moment that lasts an age, and then her voice is coming to him strongly. _There’s a cave behind the waterfall. Swim parallel to the current._

He sucks in a deep breath and dives, gritting his teeth against the pain in his useless hand as he swims in powerful strokes toward the sheeting water. Muscles floundering, he dives under the waterfall and swims until he hits a solid wall.

Surfacing, gasping for breath, tossing drenched curls out of his eyes; he pulls himself up partway onto a slick shelf of dolomite. He rests his forehead against the rock, heart like a jackhammer against his ribcage, until he feels hands grasping at his shoulders, trying to haul him onto the rock shelf.

‘Get off,’ he groans, and pulls himself up. He sprawls out over the floor of the cave, recovering. He can feel the scavenger’s eyes studying him, but he keeps his eyes closed.

‘Kylo. Your hand. It’s broken.’

‘Really? I had no idea,’ he grits. ‘Don’t touch it.’

‘Do you want to be able to use it again?’ she rapid-fires back. ‘Let me help.’

‘Why do you _want_ to help? Surely a handicapped version of me would help you sleep better at night,’ he says petulantly, keeping his eyes squeezed shut as she touches his hand, feather-light.

She scoffs. ‘Don’t be pathetic, it doesn’t suit you.’ She pokes at the splintered bones, and he bites his tongue to stopper a scream. ‘What did you _do_?’

‘Nothing worth repeating.’

He feels the slightest tingle on his skin, and the link between them warms with her damnable _light_ ; he shivers with discomfort as the antithesis of his dark energy flows from her and into him; the Light burying itself under his skin, infiltrating his veins, his marrow. He hears her thoughts as she wills him to heal. He doesn’t expect her to snort with laughter as she heals him.

‘You punched it in the face?’ she snickers, still holding his hand as the bones start to assemble and rejoin. Apparently, reading her mind also works in the reverse.

Her giggles should infuriate him, but somehow, they are infectious. A smile tilts the corners of his mouth up, and he can’t hold back a small chuckle. And then their laughter is filling the cave with raucous sound, and his hand is healed and he doesn’t entirely despise her for the moment.

‘There is something between us,’ he blurts out, ‘a connection that formed when you healed me at the point of death. Have you felt it?’

Rey bites her lip. ‘Yes,’ she admits. ‘I noticed it yesterday. I can hear your thoughts when you’re far away, and your emotions when you feel particularly intensely.’

Kylo sighs fatalistically. ‘I scarcely remember the details of this – I was so young when I was taught - but I think you created a Force bond when you healed me with the Light. Healing me now has probably strengthened the link even more.’

‘Fantastic,’ Rey drones sarcastically. ‘A Jedi and a Sith mentally linked through the Force. Just… try to stay out of my head until we figure out a way to break the bond.’

 _As you wish_ , he deliberately projects into her mind.

She airmails him a glare. ‘I mean it, Ren. Be a decent human being for the next couple of days until we get my parts back.’

He’d completely forgotten that that is their objective – something to do with being hunted by an alien beast had erased it from his memory.

‘We’d better get back to the ship before dusk,’ Rey stands up, then realizes with a sharp kick of revulsion that she is still holding her enemy’s hand. She drops it like a hot potato and brushes her palm over her trousers. ‘I think I remember the path back. This way.’

 


	7. Survival

‘We’re lost. Admit it.’

Rey purses her lips into a thin line as she marches on, the sky above them darkening with every step as the sun sinks beyond the skyline, letting the three moons of Felucia have their chance to shine. Starlight filters through the trees, pooling like molten silver on the leaves of fern and flower.

Ren stops in his tracks behind her. ‘Good job, scavenger. We’re kilometres away from your ship, in a forest with murderous animals, at nightfall.’

‘My name is _Rey_ ,’ she spits. ‘And I’d take being alone in a forest over being alone with you any day. It’s the lesser of two evils.’

He pretends to be hurt by that, his thin face alight with malice. ‘Are all Resistance pilots this bad at on-foot navigation?’

‘If _you_ hadn’t thrown that damn melon, you wouldn’t have disturbed that creature. I _knew_ where we were going before then.’

‘Operative word: **knew**.’

She doesn’t reply. Night is falling too fast: the plants around them are beginning to glow softly in the deepening darkness, phosphorescent patches of green, blue and purple lighting up wherever her feet touch. It should be fascinating. Instead it’s terrifying.

The distant sounds of chattering and canine yelping can be heard, and Rey instinctively touches the lightsaber she’d clipped back to her sash. She can see Kylo Ren, his face tinged tourmaline from luminescence, draw his own saber. His face could have been carved from stone, so emotionless – but she detects a tremble of fear in his thoughts through their bond.

 _What_? She projects.

 _I thought you told me to stay out of your head. Hypocrite_ , he volleys back.                

_Special circumstances, Ren._

He doesn’t reply, but she can glean from the timbre of his thoughts that he isn’t fond of dogs.

There is a wavering howl a few metres back beyond the ultraviolet flora, an ululation that is joined by tens of other voices. She hears Kylo swear under his breath and turn on his lightsaber, and without warning the forest around them is swarming with hundreds of red, sparkling eyes, reflecting the saber’s fire. The chattering grows to a deafening pitch, and one brave canine slinks out of the brush: a skeletal hound the colour of an eggplant, skittering like a spider on legs that are thin as twigs. But the awful snarls coming from its throat belie its frail appearance, and its eyes glint ruby before it springs at her.

Ren’s lightsaber is deafening white noise as he scythes it through the air, and the dog thuds to the ground, releasing a banshee cry as the saber carves a path through its forelimbs. Another dog flings itself at them, and Rey is forced to cut it down in mid-air, horrified at herself for killing an animal. But the onslaught continues and more hounds rush out of the bushes: it’s _kill or be killed_. Back to back, they swing their sabers in fatal arcs, bright blue and hellion red lighting up the darkness.

Everything is howling and death and flashes of light eclipsing like dead stars behind Rey’s eyes. The sensory overload becomes too much: she cries out and drops the saber. A hound seizes its opportunity and strikes, its razor teeth ripping at her trousers, grazing her calf.

And suddenly arrows are whizzing through the air, missing strands of their hair by millimetres, and both Rey and Kylo cover their heads and pray to their respective deities. Shouting in an unidentifiable language. The flicker of flames atop sticks held aloft. Howling as the hounds scatter and melt into the dark. Rey closes her eyes and envisions the Force, vibrating with unstable energy, and draws the Light into her, calming herself. _There is no chaos. There is harmony._

Rough hands seize her arms, dragging her into the light of their primitive torches. Rey stares as the firelight reveals the striking, salamander-like appearance of their rescuers. These creatures have long, sinewy bodies, two sets of arms and blue-striped grey skin. Their heads are covered by a mass of indigo tentacles that remind her of sea anemone, with eyes like chips of ruby embedded under curving brows, looking back at her with a blend of curiosity and hostility.

The female amphibian holding her arm mutters something in her native tongue, and the others in the clearing nod and turn to regard Kylo Ren, who stands stock still, holding his lightsaber in front of him. Rey knows he’s wishing he still had his helmet, because he isn’t doing a very good job of intimidating the tribesmen without it. He looks very young, his sable hair in a messy tangle over his forehead, his eyes betraying how scared he was.

A tribesman who Rey assumes was the leader, given the colourful feathers strung over his tendrils, commands something, and the others start to chivvy Rey and Kylo in the direction the aliens have come from. The forest floor is iridescent as many pairs of feet touch it, illuminating a path for Rey and Kylo to follow.

She feels Kylo reach across their link to touch her mind. _Plan_?

_Where’s your plan, genius? Can I be expected to be responsible for everything?_

_If I told you what I was planning, we’d be here arguing inside our heads for days._

_Oh right, mass murder. Why don’t you get a new party trick? You_ can’t _kill these people. They rescued us._

 _That’s debatable._ He’s toying with her, making her angry. A part of Rey thinks that that might be their only comfortable mode of interaction: furious and spitting insults at eachother.

 _Do you want more blood on your hands, Ben Solo? You truly are irredeemable;_ she needles, deliberately antagonizing him. It’s what he wanted, after all.

His response to his birth name is a searing pulse of rage, before the connection goes silent.

They walk through the luminous darkness for what could have been minutes, hours or days. Finally, Rey stumbles into an open space in the middle of the jungle, at the centre of which a colossal tree can be seen, branches spreading like the mycelia of a mushroom to form protective arms over the smaller trees. She looks upwards, eyes adjusting to the brightness of the stars above them, and gapes at what she sees: the branches of the trees are loaded with nets that contain the wreckage of planes, of _spaceships_ ; propellers poking out of holes in the netting and parts of wings trussed up in thick, braided ropes of vine.

 _Kylo_ , she exclaims, reawakening their link, _look_!

He frowns, reluctantly following her eyes up to the treasure trove.

 _I think they have our ship parts!_ She babbles, eyes shining.

 _And you plan to levitate yourself up there to retrieve them?_ He scorns, but on closer inspection of the tree, they can see small, intricately woven bridges and steps winding round the trunk and the thickest branches.

Their heads are forced down suddenly, and ropes are looped around their torsos and arms, binding them together, back-to-back. She can feel the Force, ablaze with hundreds of pinpoints of light as a crowd of natives gather round. Rey squeaks as the hard tip of a spear scratches her nose, and there is a primal cheering as a lone figure descends from the treetops, a tribeswoman with a proud headdress of neon feathers, draped in beads and unkempt fabrics. A shaman.

The shaman bends to place a webbed digit on Rey’s forehead, and Rey jerks as a spark of electricity passes between them at the contact.

‘Why have you come here?’ she asks in halting Basic, heavily accented.

‘Come here? We were _taken_ here,’ Kylo Ren snarls, struggling instinctively with the restraints that bind him to Rey.

 _You’re making it worse_ , she warns him through the link.

‘Be silent, demon. I speak only to the Light one,’ the shaman raps out. ‘What are you called, child?’

‘My name is Rey. I come from Jakku, a foreign system. I came to Felucia to investigate some battle droids that have been activated in this region. My ship was raided and parts were stolen. I can’t leave the planet without them, so I’ve come to retrieve them.’

The shaman studies her with a shrewd gaze. ‘Rey…. Light One. I _see_ you, and you speak the truth, as you know it. The _Maralii_ have the parts you search for.’

Rey hesitates. ‘Is that your tribe? Will you let me take the parts and leave?’

‘We do not help humans,’ the shaman says harshly. ‘Not since our planet was used as a dumping ground for _mi’nishri_ , the junk of your wars. There are so few of us left after the sieges of the Empire, after your kind blockaded us on our own planet, poisoning our water supply and laying waste to the ecosystem. But there is something… let me think on it.’

There is a collective hush as all the tribespeople listen to the shaman’s next words.

‘These ‘ _droids’_ you speak of have caused great pain to us. They are ugly reminders of the Clone Wars, a blight on this planet, and two moons ago a member of our tribe was injured by one of your alien toys. So this is my offer to you, Rey of Jakku. I will return your stolen ship parts, if you rid our planet of these _droids_. As you can see,’ she gestures above their heads, smiling oddly, ‘we have no great need of the parts now. They are _taronyu_ , trophies, for the children among us to play with, nothing more.’

Rey gulps, trying to think over the offer. The battle droids had nearly slain _Kylo Ren_ when he was at his most formidable – how is she supposed to destroy them? But she can sense the resolve of the shaman, and knows that their best chance of leaving Felucia is through appeasing her.

And so she shuts off the link, pre-emptively blocking out whatever insults Ren will hurl at her after she agrees, and utters a simple, ‘I will do as you ask.’

‘Good. Then you may stay tonight as our guests. When you have completed your end of the agreement, the debt is paid.’ The shaman takes a curved knife from her shawl and cuts their bonds. A couple of tribesmen grasp Rey at the elbow and lead her up the rickety steps and into the enormous tree. A couple of metres up, they’re shown to pod-like beds of reed, woven insubstantially into the branches of the tree.

Kylo climbs into his hammock with a face like a thunderhead, and Rey keeps her mind walled up, unwilling to hear his thoughts right now. Even so, ghosts of his emotions creep through into her subconscious as she slept, and she finds herself dreaming of a place far beyond any star system she knows.

 --

Kylo dreams of rain. Cleansing droplets run over his face, pearling in his hair and on his eyelashes. It almost feels like forgiveness. Almost like atonement.

And then the dreamscape is torn to shreds and a scarred, hideous face is leering at him out of the torn fragments. Pressure builds inside his head, his skull squeezed to the point of anguish. And then he’s on his knees at the foot of a stone pulpit, and Supreme Leader Snoke is talking to him, exerting his will over countless infinities, his rage palpable.

 _I have been watching you, my wayward apprentice_ , he fumes. _And I am disappointed by what I see._

 _You failed to defend yourself against a lowly battle droid._ _You failed to kill the scavenger girl when she came to the planet to rescue you. And you allowed her to save your pitiful life instead of embracing death’s hand. And now something more than a debt binds you to her. I feel it._

‘Master,’ he chokes out. ‘I did not intend-‘

_Silence. I sense more weakness in you than ever before, Kylo Ren. I feel your compassion for the girl, your reluctance to kill her and come back to me. **I saw the dream you had**._

_Your baseness disgusts me. If you want to become a truly worthy Sith Lord like your grandfather, you have much work to do._

The compression is becoming unbearable. He groans in torment.

‘What would you have me do?’

_Give me your location. Help the girl to complete her little mission, and then take her prisoner till I arrive. I will send a transit fleet to meet you once you have her hostage. Come to my Black Dahlia space station and kill her at my feet, repaying the favour for saving your life, and you will prove your value._

It takes every shred of strength not to cry out as he forces his reply beyond the pressure: ‘Master, I will. I will. We are… on a planet in the Outer Rim… Felucia! Master, the girl means _nothing_ to me.’

 _You lie_ , his master snarls. _Shall I remind you of the punishment for lying to me?_

And as the pressure moves beyond anything he has ever known, Kylo can resist no longer. His screams are endless, a black hole of suffering.

 --

 _Somebody was screaming_. Rey’s eyes fly open, the tortured cries tearing through her mind. To her right, Kylo tosses and turns in the bed of reeds, and she realizes that the screams are _his_ , locked inside his mind and coming to her through their link.

She leans over and presses a hand to his hot forehead; to the smooth, raised skin of the scar she’d given him, brushing away dark curls and summoning all the light energy she’s capable of.

‘Shhh,’ she murmurs, letting the Light leave her fingertips and sink through his skin, lulling him back to sleep. Through the skin-to-skin contact, she receives flashes of his nightmare: a stone dais, a man with a shriveled face, the terror he feels at the man’s words: _I saw the dream_. Puzzled, she tries to pull her hand away, but at the last second, Ren takes it, clutching it tightly and refusing to let go.

She feels his sleep return to an even calmness, and feeling very awkward, she lets him keep her hand as she, too, falls back into dreams.

 

 


	8. Inertia

Ren is uncharacteristically quiet the next morning as they prepare to leave the Felucians’ camp. The passage between their brains that normally sparks, electric with his mood swings is now silent, even as tribesmen bring them a small basket of tropical fruit to eat. He glances up for a moment when Rey bites into a papaya, clear juice dribbling down her chin, but merely scowls and returns to sullen reflection.

A child-sized Felucian with lurid green tentacles approaches Rey, handing over a small sack. Rey thanks them and opens the sack – it contains the system controller, the radio and all the missing wires and buttons from the dashboard. _Thank the Gods_.

They set off after breakfast, accompanied by a few members of the jungle tribe as guides. Ren walks stiffly, one hand always resting on the hilt of his lightsaber.

The journey back to the ship takes much less time when they’re not relying on Rey’s sense of direction, and within an hour they find themselves back at the _Falcon_. The tribesmen mutter to eachother in their ancient language, before touching Rey’s forehead with two fingers, then loping off into the shelter of the trees.

‘Savages,’ Ren says contemptuously, stalking up the lowered ramp into the ship. Rey frowns at his retreating back before following him. Chewie roars anxiously at her, asking for the reason they’d been gone an entire day and night.

‘Do you want the good news or the bad news first?’ she asks, setting down the bag of starship parts.

Chewie whines.

‘Okay. The good news is: I got our missing parts back. The bad news: we can’t leave Felucia until we find and exterminate the active battle droids Leia sent us here to destroy.’

In answer, Chewbacca lets out a very human, very exasperated groan.

‘Yeah. I’m about as enthusiastic as you are. But you’ve fought _Stormtroopers_. Some rusty old droids should be a piece of cake.’

Chewie shakes his head ruefully, Rey pulls out a scrap of paper, and together they sit down to plot the next stage of their adventure.

 --

Kylo Ren paces the circumference of the Falcon’s medical bay, his thoughts in a jumble behind the wall he’s erected to keep Rey from accessing them. Their connection is getting stronger by the minute – he knows it, and now Snoke knows it too. He has to find a way to break it!

A Sith and a Jedi Force-bond can only end in death or despair, even if neither of them are fully trained in their abilities yet. They’d already almost killed eachother twice; he isn’t interested in having his life threatened a third time. And now he’s sunk even further in the favour of Snoke, and that smug little warlord Hux is fast being placed on a pedestal that had been meant for _him_ , Kylo Ren, prized weapon of the First Order.

With a surge of will, he merges his intent with the Force, squeezing his eyes shut and sifting through the blinding whiteness for the ripples of Dark energy he’d felt before. Finding the darkness, he slips into that void and seeks out the coalescing shadows he feels there, vaguely in the depths of the Force, and his consciousness. He has always carried the Dark in him, and he communes with it, hoping the spirits are listening.

_Masters of the dark art, send me a sign. The Light has tempted me; I admit that I have faltered. I let the scavenger girl mark my face, then turn around and save my life. She should be dead by my hand, but she has forced a Bond between us, one that I know not how to break. Show me the path, show me my place in the dark, and I will not fall to the Light._

He wraps up his genuflection, and as he stands hopelessly in the center of the room, a single, glistening spore from the _Maralii_ tree drifts from the ceiling and into his palm.

 --

Rey musters the best of the Falcon’s arsenal and spreads it across the table. She counts four low-grade blasters, her staff, Chewie’s bowcaster, her lightsaber and oddly, a buster rocket – a taboo weapon that must have belonged to Han Solo. _But hey, at least_ that’ll _work on droids._

She feels Ren’s presence behind her, emanating disapproval and another emotion that wavers in her mind, too complex for her to identify yet.

‘What is it?’ she spins on her heel, a combative expression on her face. ‘You don’t approve? Well, I’m sorry, but it’s the only way to repay the debt to the Felucians.’

‘ _Repay_ them for ransacking your ship? You owe them nothing!’ he exclaims heatedly, and Rey is too fed up to listen to his criticism. She steps closer to him, tilting her face up until they are nose to nose.

‘You hate this, don’t you? Having no power over me. No control over anything here. You aren’t so scary without that awful mask and an army of Stormtroopers behind you, Ben Solo, and you certainly don’t frighten me with your moody teenager act.’

Ren’s face contorts at the mention of his birth name, and his voice is low and lethal as he tells her: ‘Call me that name _one more time_ and you won’t like what happens. I don’t need an army or a mask to hurt you.’

Rey lifts her chin in response. ‘Like I said, Ben Solo,’ she repeats in a soft, almost gentle tone. ‘You don’t frighten me.’

She calmly takes her blaster and staff from the table, clips her lightsaber to the tie at her waist, and walks out of the Falcon, Chewie following at her heels. BB8 stays aboard to guard, although now that they know who the thieves were, and the deal has been struck, Rey doubts they’ll need a sentry.

‘Kylo Ren,’ she calls back towards the ship. ‘When you’re done pouting, do tell us where that field of droids is, won’t you? We need your guidance.’

\-- 

He contemplates staying on-board with the BB unit just to spite them, but the damnable sphere opens a compartment on its side and points what looks like a tuning fork at him, electricity crackling at its ends. He reconsiders.

They walk slowly through the forest, the Wookie and the scavenger discussing their game plan in fluent _Shyriiwook_. Ren doesn’t like being left out of the conversation, even if it’s with people he despises: he lets his curiosity get the better of him, opening the channel between their thoughts and sliding undetected into her mind again.

_We’ll get this done as quickly as we can, then I’ll start working on the Falcon. It needs recalibration after having parts ripped out, and configuring the hyperdrive again won’t be easy -_

Her internal monologue on the Falcon’s schematics goes on and on, as clearly as if she were reciting it directly into his ear. This is proof that their connection is gaining strength, and he lets panic nibble at him before quashing all emotion, reminding himself of what he’s decided to do.

They walk on; past the pink trees he’d taken refuge in during the droideka attack. And Ren feels a slight shift in the Force, like a dark thought infiltrating a cloud of white, fading into greyscale and taking shape as the very distinctive Force signature of Supreme Leader Snoke. He had done as he promised, then.

Ren is surprised and relieved that Rey hasn’t noticed the disturbance; but then, she’s still a beginner in so many ways. She molds the Force to her clumsy will, never considering the possibility that it could fail her. She had beaten him on Starkiller through sheer luck and a slight helping hand from the Light, but she has no proper training, even after these months with his uncle.

They cut a path through a particularly tangled bracken mound, and then they are in the field of desiccated army droids. Rey switches her lightsaber on, Chewie raises his bowcaster to his shoulder, and they wait for the riot to begin.

There is a humming in the distance, carried to them on the zephyr that blows over the field, rattling the metal bones of droids like a percussion band. And then all hell breaks loose.

 

Three titanium balls whizz out of the bushes at the opposite end of the field, unfurling as they race towards the trio, black arachnid-like legs opening to reveal vicious-looking blaster cannons. Green beams crisscross the dirt as the droidekas approach, the lasers making deep wrinkles in the soil.

‘Crap, crap, crap!’ Rey cries, raising her blaster and firing at the droids. The laser bolts bounce off their metallic skins like sunlight off a mirror, and they return fire with a vengeance. She feels rather than sees Ren move in front of her, skillfully twirling his saber to deflect a laser beam that had been beelining for her chest.

 _Returning the favour?_ She asks him as she copies his movements, covering Chewie as he reloads his bowcaster.

 _Something like that,_ he thinks grimly, that unidentifiable emotion from before tainting his thoughts.

The droidekas are fanning out around them faster than they can think of a strategy, and Rey screams as a droid shoots her blaster out of her hand. She glances at Chewie, who is roaring a battle cry as he rains bolts at the droids, who dodge them easily. She can’t let him be killed. Not after Han. She closes her eyes, appealing to the Force, good or evil, she doesn’t care. _Anything, anything._

Primal instinct from an age before hers sets in, and she claps her hands together with a yell, letting the Force use her as a conduit, energy starting to gush under her skin.

There’s a series of deafening, staccato cracks and a loud sizzling, and Rey opens her eyes to the incredible sight of bright violet lightning zigzagging from her joined hands. She shakes uncontrollably as the voltage surges out of her, but she manages to move her arms and direct the flow towards the droidekas, which jackknife and hiss, their internal wiring fried by the current. All three hit the dirt in synchronization, but Rey is unable to stem the flow of electricity.

‘Enough! Stop!’ she screams aloud, hands flying out and sending lightning crackling in random directions. And with a last _zap_ , the electrical storm is over.

Chewie gapes openly at her. Ren looks absolutely bamboozled, his thoughts a mess of astonished, nonsensical words. Rey can’t help an exhilarated laugh.

‘What,’ she sniggers, ‘in the seven _hells_ was that?’

‘Force lightning,’ Ren murmurs. ‘But purple…?’ His thoughts fill in the blanks: _Sith lightning is blue. Truly, she is more powerful than even she realizes. What a waste._

‘What’s a-‘ Rey starts to say, but shut up as Ren seizes her elbow, spinning her round and throwing an arm round her neck, choking her. He positions the blade of his lightsaber directly at her throat, and Rey realizes as she searches their link what that mysterious emotion had been. Anticipation.

Chewie releases a feral snarl and jerks the bowcaster up to his shoulder, setting Kylo Ren square in his sights.

‘Fire and she dies, shagpile,’ Ren pants, the heat of his saber roasting the skin of Rey’s neck. ‘The First Order will arrive at any moment, and we’re all getting off this planet. Your choice whether it’s in your skin or in a body bag.’

Chewie whimpers, and Rey feels her heart clench at the pure desolation in his voice. She struggles against his restraining arm, but he only pulls her closer, her back presses flat against his front in some caricature of an embrace. She wants to vomit at the feeling of him against her - it reminds her of her dream, when she’d made love to him under a flowering tree.

‘You are the most vile of monsters, Ben Solo,’ Rey says, her voice brimming with revulsion. ‘Chewie is wondering what was so horrible about being the son of heroes that made you turn your back on everyone who ever loved you. But me? I expected this betrayal from you, because you are a sick, dishonorable _bastard_.’

Ren’s arm constricts painfully around her neck, but he doesn’t grace her with a response. Shadows are falling over the battlefield as the First Order’s transit shuttles search for a space to land. The enemy is here.

No - she corrects herself; hating Kylo Ren with a passion beyond anything a true Jedi could ever be permitted to feel - the enemy had always been here.

 

 

 

_________________________________

**Source for this chapter:**

**[Ionize/Purple Force lightning](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ionize) **


	9. Ceasefire

Stormtroopers flank Rey on all sides, blasters trained on her as she steps off the transit craft and onto the smooth metal floor of the hangar. She expects Ren had warned them about her proficiency with the Jedi mind trick, and they will be keen not to repeat past mistakes. She and Chewie have been frisked, stripped of their weapons, and she has never felt more powerless.

They herd her across the open-plan hangar, and she turns her head slightly in time to see the Millenium Falcon being towed pilotless into the space station. She clenches her fists at the thought of First Order devotees fixing and flying Han Solo’s most cherished item.

She’s being frogmarched down a stark corridor with sheets of dark metal for walls, blinking control panels brightening the black décor at regular intervals. They are probably password-locked, she reasons, but she keeps the panels in the back of her mind in case she needs to plot an escape later. She has no idea where they are or who she’s being taken to, but as they turn a corner, she spies Kylo Ren waiting with a stern-faced red-haired man outside a barred stone door. Ren has been restored to his former glory: dressed in the cape, cowl and helmet combination from Takodana and the interrogation room, all those moons ago. As the soulless eyes of the mask fix on her, she tries to remind herself that the same petulant Ben Solo is under there.

‘Leave us,’ Ren’s distorted voice commands, and the Stormtroopers release Rey to him. His gloved hand curls round her elbow, and he makes a complex hand movement in front of the door, which slides open with a crunch of grinding stone.

‘Not going to run, then?’ he taunts her in that mechanical, altered voice that had haunted her nightmares on Ahch-To for so long after their encounter. She presses her lips into a fine white line, and he pulls her through the door.

Rey flicks her gaze around, noting the tall pillars standing at either side of a raised platform, set with an enormous throne made of an onyx-like rock; more metallic walls, a beacon of blue light shimmering in the center of the room.

‘Supreme Leader,’ Ren speaks through the voice-changer, and the shimmer of light takes shape, morphing to become the outline of a drastically tall, terribly thin man, projected onto the black throne. Rey stares at the face of the hologram: a deep crevice cracks his face in two; smaller pockmarks pitting his cheek and chin, the skin of which is shriveled around his jaw, his lips like prunes; his rheumy, clouded eyes gazing evilly back down at her.

‘You have done well to bring the girl to me, Kylo Ren,’ the hologram rasps in a sluggish voice, burdened with effort, as though the task of talking is sapping his life force. ‘Can I trust that you recall the rest of my instruction?’

Ren hesitates, the hand that isn’t gripping her arm flexing at his side. ‘Yes, Supreme Leader. But… forgive me, Master, the girl _is_ strong with the Force. I have witnessed what is capable of, first-hand. With your guidance, I could make use of her.’

The hologram clutches the handrests of the throne and leans forward, his face warped by cruel amusement. ‘Ren, you are a fool. Your compassion for an enemy of the Order is appalling, especially for such an insignificant _thing_ as this. Show her the thanks she deserves for saving your life, or you will feel my wrath, boy.’

 --

Kylo feels Snoke’s murderous influence, permeating his thoughts, bidding him to kill the girl as he’d vowed to do. He braces himself, then releases Rey’s arm, igniting his lightsaber. And, whether on purpose or by accident he’ll never know, he isn’t quick enough.

She whirls on him, raising both hands, sending such a powerful jolt of the Force at him that he skitters backward, his resolve to kill her draining away as she glares at him, hurling another bolt of energy towards him. This time he feels his knees give way, and he falls hard, with hands spread on the floor like a supplicant.

He is very glad he’d had the foresight to put on his helmet, because he can feel his face flushing red with humiliation. Snoke, he can tell, is incensed.

‘When you disgrace yourself, you disgrace me, Ren,’ his Master says in a poisonous voice. ‘Do as you promised me, and kill the weakling!’

‘My name is _Rey_!’ he hears her shout at the hologram. ‘And I’d really appreciate it if you stopped talking about me like I’m not here!’

Snoke chuckles quietly. ‘What’s in a name, little scavenger? There are no names given to those who walk in the shadow of Death. Ren, get up.’

He tries, he really does, but she has turned his paralyzing power against him, and pushing against her is like trying to lift a tonne of solid concrete. He scrabbles on the floor for his saber hilt, switching it on and making one last herculean effort to throw her off, but he may as well have tried to shove over a brick wall with a feather. How is she so powerful, this scavenger from Jakku, barely out of adolescence? That was a question he’d asked himself countless times.

The Supreme Leader was beginning to question it, too. The bloodlust left him as swiftly as it had come, replaced by a cold curiosity.

‘Rey, then. A ceasefire, if you please, while we talk. Let my apprentice up, I give you my word he will not harm you now.’

 --

‘Your word means nothing,’ Rey spits back, but her will fades and Ren is able to stand again, albeit unsteadily. ‘The last time I made a truce with a member of the First Order, I ended up kidnapped and brought onboard this space station. Where am I, anyhow?’

The corners of Snoke’s mouth twitch. ‘This is my baby. The Black Dahlia space station, completely mobile and a quarter of the size of the facility your precious little friends desecrated on Starkiller Base. That’s all you need to know about it. And now it is your turn to be questioned.’

Without warning, Rey’s head bows with an incredible pressure, akin to somebody pushing their entire body into the cramped space of her cranium. She gasps and clutches at her temples, trying to keep her skull from flying apart. And she hears Snoke’s voice inside her head, rumbling as he rummages through every hemisphere, every squiggle and system of her brain.

_There is something here… yes, there is something… **who are you**?_

With a supreme act of strength, Rey forces his presence back, atom by atom, so that he is not overwhelming her thoughts. And she gives him three words in answer: both in her head and aloud.

‘I’m no one.’

 _‘Liar_!’ Snoke wrenches himself out of her head, frowning in displeasure. He presses a button somewhere out of range of the hologram. ‘There is something puzzling about you, Rey of Jakku, and I believe me, I will solve that puzzle. I like a challenge every now and then.’

The door crunches open behind them, and a pair of Stormtroopers bend Rey’s arms behind her back. ‘Take her to the cellblock, bind and gag her. Do not let her escape, or there will be consequences.’

\-- 

Alone in the throneroom, Kylo Ren almost misses the buffer of the girl, as Supreme Leader Snoke turns his full attention to him.

‘Take off that mask, my apprentice,’ the hologram orders. ‘It’s just us now. You mentioned seeing the girl’s Force abilities firsthand. Tell me.’

Ren reaches up to remove the helmet, and once it’s off he meets the eyes of his Master with reluctance. ‘She _is_ powerful, my lord,’ he admits, ‘it was not only luck that allowed her to best me on Starkiller Base. Today we were ambushed by a group of rogue destroyer droids, and when she saw the Wookie with us was in danger, she… she started shooting purple Force lightning from her hands.’

Snoke’s milky eyes spark with excitement.

‘But she had no idea what she was doing,’ Ren adds swiftly. ‘She couldn’t stop once she’d started; she has no control over any of her powers, really. She is uneducated and entirely unenlightened, even after training under the last Jedi.’

Snoke taps two skeletal fingers against the welts on his chin. ‘So,’ he says slowly, calculating, ‘while she has no control over her powers, said powers are impressive. More impressive even than yours, I dare say. Which is what you are concerned about, is it not? That I will replace you with the scavenger?’

Ren flushes, glowering at the tips of his boots. He wishes he had his mask on.

Snoke smiles grimly. ‘I do not deny that the notion is tempting. You have been of great disappointment and worry to me, Kylo Ren. The Light still calls to you, and for this reason you are weak. But you are loyal, for all your faults, and I find I am too old to be bothered schooling a new apprentice in the dark art, especially one so defiant as this girl.’

‘Therefore, I have a new task for you. Sway the girl to the Dark Side; open her mind to the power of the night, and all will be forgiven. If she continues training under Skywalker, I fear she will become an unstoppable Jedi knight, like him. You know, he was capable of Force lightning, too, when the situation called for it. And there was another… Revan; a warrior of both the dark side and the light… but that was before my time.’

‘Master, I do not think I can convince her. She abhors the Dark Side, and hates me too. Why would she listen?’

Snoke rests his chin on his palm, ruminating. ‘Yes, she certainly does… and hate is a dark emotion, akin to passion. That girl is something, but she is no Jedi, at least not in the disciplined sense. And…’ he reaches out, his incorporeal fingers touching Kylo’s exposed cheek, ‘you have more at your disposal than words, do you not? Remember: I have just glimpsed inside her mind. I know of the bond you share. The dream you had. Would it surprise you to know that that dream was not yours alone?’

Kylo stares at his master in awe. ‘Master, what are you saying?’

‘She is drawn to you; in the same way you are drawn to her. If the only way of seducing her to the darkness is a literal seduction, then I trust you will do what must be done. And do try to be quick about it - I am not as patient as I once was. Report to me in a week.’

He flicks a hand, and the door behind Kylo opens again - his cue to go. He leaves in silence. Outside the room, he jams his helmet back on, to disguise the emotions that ghost over his face as he thinks.

 _What to believe_? The Supreme Leader wouldn’t lie, and he _had_ just seen inside the girl’s mind – but can she really be persuaded to join them? Only today she had told him he had no power over her, taunted him with that fact, and he’s inclined to trust her. Had she shared the dream he’d had about her? The thought causes his face to turn beet-red under the mask, and he distracts himself with a tangent before the flush can spread elsewhere.

Supreme Leader had said that Luke Skywalker could shoot Force lightning from his hands, but Ren had thought that lightning was an ability exclusive to the most gifted Sith Lords. And who was the _Revan_ that Snoke had mentioned? If he had been legend even before Snoke’s lifetime, he must have been in power from a time before the formation of the Galactic Empire.

One thing is certain, he decides as he heads for the cellblock where the Stormtroopers have deposited Rey. With power like hers, the Supreme Leader will not be satisfied until Ren has seduced her to the Dark Side, and made her a pawn for the First Order. So he’d better get a head-start.

 


	10. Power Play

Rey is curled up on the small pallet in the corner of her cell, recuperating from Snoke’s ruthless invasion of her mind. She has a thumping headache, and her mind feels dirty and sore from the direct psychic contact with Ren’s master. She can’t help wondering what had happened after she’d been shepherded from Snoke’s chambers, and despite the blunt ache behind her eyes, she opens her end of the link, trying to see what Kylo Ren is thinking. But his mind is inaccessible to her, and she sinks back onto the pallet in weariness.

There’s a rattle and clang, and the door to her cell swings open. Kylo Ren stands outside, the eye-slit of his mask trained on her. He doesn’t say a word.

She scowls at him. ‘Ashamed to look at me without that thing? I’m not surprised. _Traitor_.’

She can feel the irritation prickling on his skin. The connection is as strong as ever, then. But his thoughts are his own as he replies, his voice terse even with the voice-changer’s distortion: ‘Would you like to sleep in this cell tonight? Be my guest.’

‘Where else would I sleep?’ Rey asks, mystified. ‘I am your prisoner, aren’t I? The tables have well and truly turned. Although your hospitality, compared to mine, leaves something to be desired.’

Ren takes the bait as she’d intended, yanking off the helmet, his face hot with pique. ‘As I recall, _you_ bound me to a tiny stretcher with ropes.’

Rey laughs out loud. ‘Your tempers are too easy to stoke, Ren.’ But she lifts herself off the pallet, walking sinuously over to him. ‘Or should I say, _Ben_? Remarkably similar-sounding names. One gets easily confused.’

She still can’t hear his thoughts, but she’d guess they contain profanity.

‘It’s fortunate that the Supreme Leader has a use for you,’ Ren says menacingly as he takes her arm, leading her down the cellblock. ‘Because I am more and more tempted to exterminate you like the pest you are.’

Rey snorts. ‘Please. You couldn’t even kill me when your master _actually_ wanted you to.’

‘Shut up and follow me. And don’t try to use the Force, or I will have the guards take you straight back to that cell.’

‘Before or after getting fried by lightning?’ she cracks, but she follows. They stride together down a number of monochrome corridors, and Rey takes notice of the signs above certain rooms: _Proving grounds. Library. Cargo bay._

They turn another corner, and Ren finally stops outside a plain metallic door. He keys in a password, keeping one hand on her arm at all times, and the door whooshes open.

Rey scans the room: it’s spartan, empty of everything except the basics; a table and chair, a lamp, a kitchen area and a door on the far side of the room that most likely leads to Ren’s bedroom.

There are no wall hangings, no splashes of colour to lighten the bleak nothingness of the room. She thinks sadly that it suits the specter in the mask, not the human man who had punched a panther, leaped off a cliff, confessed to feeling a connection with her and slept in a tree-pod under the stars all in the space of one day. And even though she knows logically that one good deed does not change Kylo Ren’s hateful personality, his abrupt turnaround from a truce to a betrayal seems uncharacteristic.

 _But then_ , she thinks ruefully, _that’s probably what Luke asked himself when his nephew murdered the other Padawans at the Jedi temple._

The murderer in question jerks her arm, pointing to the couch. ‘You will sleep here for now, until the Supreme Leader gives further instruction. The door is made from titanium, and locks from the outside, so I doubt even your newfound abilities could open it, though I invite you to try.’

‘I’ll save my strength,’ Rey replies casually, sitting down on the couch. ‘Are you sure you trust me not to stab you in your sleep?’

Kylo Ren grins mirthlessly. ‘With what? An invisible knife? And _my_ door locks from the inside.’

‘Like that could stop me.’

‘I could stop you myself.’

‘I am stronger than you.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Will we?’

‘That’s enough,’ Ren ends their sparring match. ‘A service droid will bring food in the morning. Until then, leave me alone.’ He pushes the door to his bedroom open, a strip of mattress visible for a second before he shuts the door behind him.

‘Fine by me,’ Rey puts her feet up on the couch cushion, then sends through the link: _Sweet dreams._

She isn’t sure, but she thinks she might have heard a growl.

 --

She tosses and turns on the couch, unable to sleep. It isn’t surprising, considering the company, but still dissatisfying, and she grows more and more bored. She gets up and searches the kitchen drawers for a weapon, but Ren hadn’t been joking: invisible knives only. He doesn’t have any books. She knows this is a relatively new space station if it had been built after the collapse of Starkiller, but come on!

She accidentally bangs into the side of Ren’s table as she makes her way back to the couch, and the table-legs squeal as they move across the floor. Rey winces, hoping against hope that the noise hasn’t woken him. There are no sounds of stirring from behind his bedroom door, so she settles herself back down onto the couch and tries something new.

She draws on the Force, breathing deeply in and out as she lies on her back, trying to imagine energy leaving the ether and seeping into her body with every inhale. She imagines a glowing golden bubble of Light behind her eyes, swelling and expanding until it pops, spilling power through every muscle and nerve until she’s dizzy with it. And then she casts her thoughts out, past the spirals of star systems and the celestial dust of galaxies, to form an interstellar connection with her master.

 --

Inside a sandstone temple built atop the grassy knoll of Ahch-To’s smallest island, Luke Sykwalker is shaken awake in the middle of the night by an insistent call. He rubs the crust from sleepy blue eyes and sits up in bed, searching the Force for the entity that had woken him. He can feel the light, pure energy of his Padawan; can see her Force sign wavering in the cosmic net that is the Force, but her transmission to him is shaky, out of focus.

He listens hard as her words stop and start, echoing through his mind: _Master, if ... read… help. I am a prison-… Dahlia space…. –oke, the dark lord, he interroga-… there is… Force-bond, he wants… for it. I am afraid._

The admittance of fear is verboten for a Jedi: it is a selfish emotion that hinders rather than helps. But as Luke runs a hand through his grizzled grey hair, he fears too, for the safety of his apprentice, and what horrors wait in the spaces between her words.

The transmission is still going, Rey’s voice waxing and waning, when a second voice joins hers, and the visceral reaction Luke has to hearing it nearly jolts him off the bed.

 _Skywalker. Your student is with my apprentice, and soon, with the Dark Side. Do not come for her, unless you wish to meet an end far crueler than the one I have planned for you once I discover your whereabouts._ And Rey’s broadcast to him is truncated, leaving the Jedi Master sitting shellshocked in his bed.

The jeering, slow voice is that of Supreme Leader Snoke, but strangely, when he concentrates, he can see the Force signature of a long forgotten enemy. The churning confusion of gunmetal grey that is the Force signature of Ben Solo.

Snoke using his apprentice as a medium for threatening him is not surprising, if new. But this had been Rey’s Force-sending. How had Ren and Snoke hijacked it?

He racks his brain, going over the few words he’d deciphered in Rey’s _sending_ to him. Prison. Dahlia. _Force-bond._

He clasps his hands together, his expression grave beneath a salt-and-pepper beard. And for the second time since Rey had awakened him, Luke Skywalker feels the subtle knife of fear.

 --

Kylo Ren dreams he’s talking with his uncle on a deserted island. The air is crisp and salty, and the breeze ruffles his cloak, lifting his cowl to expose his face. When Luke sees what’s underneath, his face freezes in a comical mask of terror. And when Ren speaks again, it is with the rasping tones of the Supreme Leader.

It seems like forever before can drag himself from the deep depression of sleep, and once half-alert he pinches the skin of his arm, hard, to ground himself in reality. He feels the link between himself and the scavenger grow hot with exertion, then cool as she stops whatever activity she’s been occupied with.

He presses a button to the left of his bedroom door, and it slides open for him.

‘What are you doing?’ he marches out into the living area, almost tripping over in the blackness. He waves a hand and the lights blink on. Rey is out cold on the couch - whatever she’d been up to has taken all the energy she had. Curious, he positions himself behind her and lightly touches the crown of her head. Direct mind reading is more satisfying than using their link, and he smiles to himself as her slumbering mind grants him access, and he starts to ransack her recent memories.

 _The crushing, smothering sightlessness of Snoke inside her head._ He knows that one all too well. Moving on.

_The hatred that festers in her as he opens the door to her cell._

_The incomprehensible amounts of strength it had taken to send the message to Luke, asking him to come to her aid. And the odd paranoia she’d felt while talking, as if someone had been listening-_

Kylo Ren’s fist curls as he lets his ever-present anger boil over inside him, and he wrenches his hand up, holding onto a hank of her hair so that she is dragged up off the couch with the motion. Rey cries out as her eyes fly open.

‘What the _fuck_ have you done?’ he yells, yanking hard on her hair again. The scavenger whimpers and clutches at her scalp, but he doesn’t care a jot for the pain he’s causing her. ‘You sent a message to _him_? To _Skywalker_?’ He lets go of her hair and grabs her by the arms, squeezing so hard that he can _feel_ the bruises he inflicts on her skin through the rawness of their link, flayed wide open and pulsating, red-hot with his rage.

‘Yes– please, stop it…’ Rey says in a cracked wisp of a voice, no energy left in her to fight him off after the Force-sending.

In response to her plea he raises his hand and slams her against the wall with a potent Force blast. Rey’s breath comes in exhausted gasps, and she lacks the strength to move as he advances on her, his black-gloved hand extended towards her, blurring and reshaping as she fights not to pass out. The Force-sending has taken everything: her legs are like jelly, and the Force is unresponsive to her as she tries her hardest to summon the light.

Kylo Ren spreads his hands on either side of her head, trapping her against the wall. His black eyes are smouldering with animosity and another, deeper emotion as he sneers at her.

‘You think your precious Master will build a spaceship out of fucking _rocks_ and fly here to save you? You’re delusional. The Last Jedi is nothing but a weak fool and a coward.’

His ridicule of her master sparks something in Rey, a hint of her feistiness returning.

‘You’re the coward,’ she whispers back. ‘Throwing tantrums like a two-year old, pulling my hair and trying to bully me?’ Her tone becomes scathing. ‘You’re like a schoolyard kid with a crush, Ben Solo.’

‘ _Don’t_ ,’ he screams, ‘ _say that name!’_

And the wall on either side of her head explodes - plaster dust raining down on both of their heads, settling in their hair and turning patches of it chalky-white.

Rey almost slides down what’s left of the wall, her momentary strength deserting her again. But she meets Ren’s feverish eyes bravely.

 _Ben Solo_ , she thinks hard, narrowing her eyes as she sends the words through their link. _Ben Solo, the spoiled son of Leia and Han, the puppet of Snoke. The pitiful, detestable man. I feel so sorry for you. You could kill me, kill Luke, and you’ll still be dead inside._

And she will never have a clue what it was that she’d said to make it happen, but Kylo Ren grabs her roughly by the neck and jerks her face up to meet his.

And kisses her.

 


	11. Solstice

His mind fogs over and his vision is shot through with crimson, and Kylo Ren shakes with barely suppressed rage as the scavenger girl stands nose to nose with him, defying him with her last drop of energy. She’s _teasing_ him, telling him that he’s no better than the other imbecilic children he’d watched growing up, harassing the little girls they liked in a bid for their attention. That isn’t what this is! Not some petty little infatuation with the first woman he’s seen without body armour in five years. He’s not _that_ vapid.

She speaks his forbidden name, the three syllables he’d left lying in the dust when he was rechristened Kylo Ren. He sees red again, and he gives in to the rage he’s a slave to, screaming at her to never mention that name again. He takes the full force of his ire out on the wall he’d trapped her against, and the plaster cracks, sending white powder like bomb fallout over the two of them.

He feels the girl’s resolve ebb from her body like lifeblood, and her knees begin to give out. But she fixes him with a beady eye, refusing to yield to him. She’s so stubborn, so fierce; her tempestuousness nearly a match for his own as he experiences her emotions through their Force-bond, a peculiar kind of synaesthesia. He sees the feelings as colours: the red of her hatred, rich vermilion against the deep indigo of her despair, whether directed towards him, herself or her captive situation, he doesn’t know. Her own wrathful passions a bright purple, like the lightning she’d shot from her hands. And another, softer emotion, throbbing pink and raw like the inside of a heart. _Pity_.

The sand creature pities _him_! He who had torn whole planets to shreds with his bare hands; slain his own father to better commit himself to the path of the Sith; who had risen through the ranks of the First Order so quickly and so famously? He, the last scion of Darth Vader!

She has no idea how deeply she’s offended him. And as she sends her thoughts into his mind, telling him that she feels _sorry_ for him, he doesn’t know what’s left for him to do. He can’t intimidate her. He can’t overpower her. He can’t resist her.

And so Kylo Ren tilts her chin towards him and kisses the scavenger girl full on the lips, half in an attempt to shut her up and half because he is _out of ideas_.

She tastes sweet, a mixture of nectar and skin. Her lips are soft as petals, such a contrast to his own hard, chapped ones, and he shivers slightly at the sensation as he brushes his mouth against hers, hating himself more completely with every second of contact that passes between them. _This is wrong,_ all reason insists. But the link between them seems to warm and grow, feeding off the energy of their fusion, this new way of interacting, and he hears her whisper to him-

_Get the bloody hell off!_

There is the wet sound of skin on skin and his cheek lights up with brilliant, stinging pain. He reels back from her, breaking the kiss, and gingerly touches his reddening cheek. Rey stands shakily a metre away, one open palm raised in a facsimile of the slap.

‘You hit me,’ he says, amazed.

‘You _kissed_ me!’ she exclaims angrily, her whole face turning puce with disgust and embarrassment. ‘You really are a rabid animal, Ren. You go from killing to kissing in the blink of an eye.’

 --

Ren rakes his eyes up and down her, panting slightly, his dark eyes glittering with excitement. ‘Don’t act like this isn’t what you wanted,’ he says in a conceited tone. ‘Exactly what you _dreamed_ of, in fact. Or did I forget to mention that Supreme Leader told me all about your little fantasies?’

Rey raises her chin in quiet dignity. ‘My thoughts are my own. I do not have to justify or acknowledge them to you. And what would he see if he pried into _your_ mind, Ben? I’m guessing nothing that you’d shout from the rooftops.’

‘I have told you and told you not to call me by that name,’ Ren growls at her, a strange intensity in his face as he leans closer. ‘I’m beginning to think you have some sort of a death wish.’

Rey shrugs and says with no small amount of bravado, ‘Maybe I do. Either that, or I’m just not frightened of you.’ It’s only half a lie. She isn’t frightened of _him_ anymore, she theorizes. More the things he stands for. The symbol of Kylo Ren is more intimidating than the person.

‘Oh, yes?’ he grinds out, obviously following her thought pattern through their connection. ‘Evidently, I will need to try harder in future.’

‘Hot tip: generally, threatening to kill someone and then sticking your tongue down their throat doesn’t make for a convincing scare tactic.’

‘Enough.’ He tugs his fingers through his overlong hair in exasperation. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of being a nuisance?’

It’s a rhetorical question, but she answers anyway. ‘ _You_ brought me here, remember? That was a choice _you_ made. If my presence annoys you, let me fix the Millenium Falcon and I’ll gladly get out of your hair.’

‘Yes, and you’ll fly yourself straight back to Skywalker and spill all the sordid little details of your ordeal to him, including the name and whereabouts of this space station,’ Kylo Ren retorts, turning away from her to pace the room.

After a few strides, he whirls on her again, accusation heavy in his tone. ‘Why do you _want_ to go back to him? From what I have seen, he has taught you nothing: no skills, no combat strategies, no control of your emotions. Luke Skywalker is old and obsolete. There is no power to be gained by devoting your life to a dying order.’

‘On the contrary, if I become the next Jedi, the Jedi order will be my legacy,’ Rey asserts, folding her arms in defiance. ‘And Luke has taught me almost everything he knows.’

‘Then you must be a terrible pupil,’ Kylo Ren remarks, bending down until they are face to face. ‘I have never met a person so full of dark energy as you, the night you scarred my face on Starkiller. You fight like a Dark Sider, but you have pledged allegiance to the Light.’

‘Rey…’ he says sincerely, and she feels a thrill of fear at the conflict she can feel warring inside him as he struggles with the right words. ‘…you have no idea how powerful you could become. You could be magnificent, but not with Luke. Not restricted by the rules of an out-of-date doctrine. The passion you have… it is the essence of the Dark Side. And,’ he swallows, continuing, ‘I won’t deny that I have been drawn to the darkness in you.’

‘If you opened yourself to the Dark Side, you would be free forever, rather than swearing yourself to a life of ritual and rules.’

Rey actually laughs out loud. ‘ _Free_? Like you, you mean? You’re the least free person I’ve ever met, Kylo Ren. You spend your life under the thumb of a dictator, jumping to attention every time he so much as sneezes. You’re just the killer puppet, and Snoke holds all your strings. Do you actually think you have autonomy?’

\-- 

Kylo Ren is about to tell the scavenger that yes, actually, he is free, but before he can give her a piece of his mind, his master’s voice is entering his.

_Come to me. Bring the girl. There is fresh news to discuss._

He recognises the irony of the moment, but refuses to let it show as he tells her, ‘The Supreme Leader requests your presence. Get dressed.’

She glances down at the dirty scraps of fabric she used as clothing. ‘I am dressed.’

He sighs, walked into his bedroom and opening the wardrobe, pulling out some military issue pants and a black silk undershirt. These clothes are generic – they aren’t even his, but they’ll do. He marches back into the living area, tossing the outfit to her. ‘The Supreme Leader doesn’t like disorder in any form. You got away with it yesterday, but he was in a good mood then. Put those on.’

She wrinkles her nose at the clothing. ‘I’m not wearing your clothes!’

Ren stares at her impassively. ‘You will either put those on yourself, or I will do it for you. Make your choice.’

Her glare is practically infrared as she stomps past him into his bedroom to change. Her vitriolic thoughts float back to him through their link: _How long did it take to get the bloodstains out from these, Jedi Killer?_

He laughs quietly. _There’s that temper again. Careful not to let it get the better of you._

_Says the man who blew up a wall in an outburst._

‘All right, all right. Just hurry up.’ He waits for her by the door, arms crossed. The link between them is still running hot, and he catches the occasional sensation of touch as she dresses, the silk of his shirt sliding easily over her sun-browned skin. The light traces make him think about that reckless kiss again, the softness of her lips on his, the dreamlike _sweetness_ of her, and he quickly distracts himself when he realizes he’s hard, his erection tenting his pants underneath his robe. Now is _not_ the time, not when they’re due to convene with Supreme Leader. He jams the mask back over his head to hide the burgeoning blush.

 --

Rey steps out of Kylo’s bedroom, tucking the shirt into the trousers, which bunch around her narrow waist and are too long in the legs. ‘Good enough for his majesty?’

He sighs at her obstinance. ‘It will suffice. Barely. Now, follow me.’

Rey obeys, grumbling under her breath that it is presumptuous of Snoke to call them to a meeting at the crack of dawn.

‘I thought rebel justice never slept,’ Ren says, his altered voice deadpan as they walk side by side.

‘Very funny. You should have your own cantina show,’ Rey says caustically. And they don’t have time for more jokes, because they’ve arrived at the door to Snoke’s throneroom. Rey bites her bottom lip as they walk through the door and see the hologram again, perched on the metal throne, examining something in his hands: as she stops at the foot of the raised podium, she realizes it’s a quartz crystal, one used for scrying into the future, she assumes.

Snoke holds up a bony finger, picking up the crystal and setting it somewhere to the side of the holographic image. As he resettles himself in his chair and peers down at them, Rey hears Kylo Ren’s voice inside her head: _Don’t say a word, Rey._

She frowns, but holds her tongue as the Supreme Leader scrutinizes her. ‘My, my, my.’ His eyes rove over her borrowed black clothes. ‘Our little blackstar. I see a night spent on the Dahlia hasn’t snuffed out your Light… yet. Kylo Ren has his work cut out for him.’

She flicks her eyes to Ren, who shifts uncomfortably, not meeting anybody’s gaze.

‘I trust you had an uninterrupted sleep,’ Snoke says smoothly. ‘Aside from your late-night long distance chat with Luke Skywalker.’

Rey’s every muscle tenses, a sudden spike of adrenaline coursing through her. _He knew! How? How?_

‘Yes, I’m sorry for interrupting that little dalliance,’ Snoke continues, his voice colder and more cutting than shards of ice. ‘The bond between yourself and my apprentice is really quite enthralling. I like to keep an eye on my possessions, and due to this _Force-bond_ , Ren’s mind now extends to yours. So imagine my surprise when I felt Luke Skywalker’s Force signature enter his mind in the middle of the night. Quite the shock. I hope I didn’t scare him off.’ Snoke smiles diabolically and steeples his fingers. ‘I must ask you not to do that again, Rey. Your boldness amuses me, but it is becoming tedious to constantly fend off the rebels as they discover each new location of ours.’

He drops all pretense from his voice, his ancient face creases with anger. ‘If you attempt to communicate again with anybody outside a one-mile radius of this space station, I will open your brain and excise the parts that are capable of speech. It will not be gentle or merciful. Do I make myself clear?’

Rey remembers Kylo’s advice and pretends she’s mute, nodding her assent.

‘Exquisite,’ Snoke breathes. ‘As I said, the concept of the Force-bond is fascinating. I will investigate it further, when there isn’t important business to discuss. Rey, can we trust you to make your own way back to Ren’s quarters, or do you require a Stormtrooper?’

‘I can find it myself,’ she mutters, keeping her eyes lowered.

‘Good. Then you are dismissed.’ He waves his hand and the door opens. Rey leaves without another word.

 --

‘The girl’s spirit is broken, for now. I don’t doubt that there will be a resurgence within five minutes. She _is_ a feisty one – so much raw power and potential. But I didn’t call you here to sing the scavenger’s praises together. Lately I have been anxious that the rebels will track down the Dahlia, since we have no other home base but Moraband and that is currently untouchable. I had already been considering claiming a new world as another training base, and the girl’s impudence provided the catalyst I needed. The planet you so luckily crash-landed on will make a perfect replacement for Starkiller: it’s difficult to reach, far away from the Coruscant Core, and relatively untouched. I researched it before I sent ships to retrieve you.’

‘Master, with all due respect, the planet is seething with dangerous wildlife,’ Ren says delicately. ‘It may not be feasible to send troops there. There are tribes of Felucian natives, armed with arrows and other weapons, who would fight for their territory.’

Snoke leers. ‘That’s what I am expecting, my disciple. A bloodbath. It has been so long since the erasure of the Hosnian system…. I want to conquer another planet. I am dispatching all available battle squadrons to Felucia tomorrow, and I want you and that delightful Phasma to lead the troops into the slaughter. And it _will be_ slaughter. The First Order will stake claim on this planet, build a second base, and train a new army of devotees. We need to regroup before we can fully decimate the Resistance and the New Republic.’

‘I do not need your consent, but I am asking you, Ren. Will you act as commander tomorrow on the battlefield?’ Snoke gives him a sly smile. ‘There is another commander here who would be very jealous that you were entrusted with this task.’

 _Hux_ , Ren realizes, a petty triumph stealing through his mind at the thought of the obnoxious warlord stuck back on the space station while he and Phasma are glorified in combat.

Snoke knows all too well how to manipulate him. But all the same, he bows his head and says, ‘Thank you for the opportunity, Supreme Leader. I will not fail you.’

‘We shall see,’ Snoke replies artlessly. The door opened behind Kylo, and he turns to go as the Supreme Leader’s parting words rumble inside his head.

_Ren. Don’t let the new orders overshadow yesterday’s. Make the girl yours, until she is ready to be mine._

 


	12. History Repeats Itself

Rey is waiting for Kylo when he returns, sitting at the plain table in the center of the living room with a service droid at her side, holding a stacked tray of food.

‘Breakfast is served, sir and madam,’ it beeps, setting the tray down on the table and whirring out the door. ‘Have a pleasant morning!’

Rey crosses one leg over the other and glances up at him. ‘You should probably invest in a second chair,’ she says lightly. ‘Where are you going to sit?’

‘The couch is fine,’ he answers absently, unwrapping a salad bowl full of chopped fruit. Rey raises her eyebrows at his carelessness. Something has Kylo Ren preoccupied, and it makes her curious. Nevertheless, she dips a hand into the fruit bowl and pops a slice of red, seeded fruit in her mouth. It’s crunchy and tart, almost bitter. ‘Ugh.’ She picks up a piece of green fruit next. Much sweeter. A bead of juice runs down her chin and she wipes it away with the hem of his silk shirt. Even that doesn’t faze him. _Wow_.

She takes a bowl of food from the tray – a gluggy, grey substance that resembles oatmeal – and pours blue milk from the provided jug over the top. As she eats, she tries to subtly enter Kylo Ren’s mind, to see what has made him so pensive and quiet, but he has barricaded himself completely, no weak points for her to exploit. He moves to the couch, unaware of her probing, sits down and rubs at his forehead.

Rey finishes the bowl of mush. ‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’

He doesn’t turn around, shoulders hunched slightly. ‘No.’

Rey shakes her head and grabs a slice of peach from the bowl, standing up and walking over to the couch. She holds it out in front of her, silent and unwavering, until he takes it from her.

‘What’s going on?’ she asks him bluntly. ‘You’re acting weird, even for you.’

‘Nothing’s going on,’ he replies automatically, holding the peach between thumb and forefinger, as though he’s forgotten how to eat.

‘You’re meant to put that in your mouth, you know. And you suck at lying – you’ve been quiet ever since you got back from the meeting with Snoke. What did he say to you?’

Ren’s eyes finally meet hers, but they are empty of his usual irascibility. ‘I’m hardly going to gossip about a private conversation between master and apprentice, Rey.’

Her name sounds strange when uttered in his deep voice, and she realizes with a small shock that that’s only the second time in all their conversations that he’s called her Rey. Not _scavenger_ , not _girl_ , not _desert rat_.

‘Ben,’ she says softly, half in an attempt to stoke the coals of his temper. ‘Tell me what he said to you.’

‘It’s none of your concern.’ He stands up suddenly, forcing her to step back out of his space. ‘Nothing I do is any of your concern.’ He sidesteps her and heads for his bedroom. Opening the door, he half-turns back towards her. ‘I have a meeting in an hour, so you can either stay here or I will have a guard escort you to someplace on the station.’

‘I don’t need a chaperone. I’m not going to run away,’ she affirms, locking eyes with him, trying to read whatever it was he was stifling.

‘You could go to the library. It probably isn’t safe for you to go to the training grounds or the common rooms - the other knights would see you as a target,’ Ren smiles humorlessly. ‘If you stay there after midday, let one of the patrolling droids know and they will bring you food. Don’t go to the refectory. They won’t be pleased to serve any rebels there, I assure you.’

‘Okay,’ she says uncertainly. ‘But Kylo-‘

‘Don’t,’ he says quietly, his face carefully turned away from hers, and he walks into his bedroom, shutting her out.

 --

An hour later, as promised, Rey is following the posted signs to the library. How the First Order had managed to accumulate enough books to build a library on a brand-new space station is beyond her understanding, but any book would be better than sitting around, bored, in Kylo Ren’s rooms. She walks through a hall, thankfully empty of troopers, and pauses in front of a large, pale oak door, in stark contrast to the abundance of black metal that comprises the Dahlia.

She knocks and enters.

She scans the room as she walks: a high, arched ceiling tapers down to meet row upon row of wooden shelves, all crammed with messy manuscripts and bound books, a chair in every annex and a circle of tables arranged throughout an alcove at the back of the room. The floor here is not metallic; it’s a black marble, with threads of dark pink and red streaking the surface. The walls are the same, but hung with tapestries depicting various victories of the dark side through the ages. She recognises only two pictures: the second Deathstar, resplendent in starlight, and a illustration of a Sith lord, face obscured by a hood, cobalt lightning flowing from his fingertips.

She spreads her own fingers and inspects them, thinking about how intuitively she’d summoned the Force lightning on the battlefield, and how she could learn to do it properly without Luke’s instruction. But Ren had thought that casting lightning bolts was a Dark Side privilege, and Rey realizes, cursing herself for her stupidity, that she is in a _library on a Dark side space station._

She browses the shelves, but the books all have titles like ‘The Mandalorian Wars: A History’, and ‘Prophets Through The Ages’. She isn’t going to trawl through hundreds of dusty tomes, so she closes her eyes and centers herself, drawing deep breaths of the cool, ducted air. She weaves an image into being inside her mind: a stack of books with information about Force lightning, Force-bonds and any other relevant topics. She reaches out a hand, eyes tightly shut, entrusting the Force to help her.

 _Guide me_ , she urges, and her feet move of their own accord, her outstretched fingers brushing against the spines of books, sweeping certain volumes off the shelves and onto the floor. She drifts blindly around the shelves, her senses tingling as she traces the embossed titles like Braille, and when she’s satisfied, she opens her eyes again.

At least two books are on the floor of each aisle, so she gathers them in her arms and makes a beeline for the cluster of tables at the back of the library. She cracks the spine of one yellowed book entitled ‘ **Sith Lords Of The Centuries: 3999 – 3399 BBY’** , and begins to read.

 --

‘Reinforcement troopers were dispatched two nights ago, and should arrive by late this afternoon. I have taken inventory of the weapons stock, and there is a surplus, so I am assigning a blaster and a flamethrower to each Stormtrooper we send into the field,’ Phasma wraps up her presentation, chrome armour clanking as she returns to her place at General Hux’s side. They’re sitting around a circular table with twelve seats, nine of them empty.

Kylo Ren, masked and hooded, studies the rudimentary battle chart that is spread over the centre of the table. Captain Phasma walks over to join him, pointing out the landing spaces for their transit shuttles, the location of the ambush they will set up with Stormtroopers and a surprise airstrike by a fleet of TIE fighters.

‘Everything seems to have been taken care of. What do you need from my Knights before tomorrow?’

‘Just preparation at this stage,’ Hux interjects before Phasma can respond. ‘We aim to be on the ground by 0400, before the planet’s dawn; so let them know to assemble at the main hangar before 0330,’

Kylo can’t resist the opportunity. ‘We? But I had assumed you were staying onboard for this mission, General?’

Hux’s face stiffens, and he says peevishly, ‘Leader Snoke gave me instructions to supervise the TIE fighter pilots, so I will need to remain here and establish a communication loop. It is my specialisation.’

Kylo cocks his head to the side, grinning underneath the helmet. ‘You couldn’t have done that from the air? Like, say, by piloting a TIE fighter yourself?’

Hux pushes himself to his feet, bracing his hands on the tabletop as he leans across it towards Kylo. ‘No more than you could, Ren,’ he breathes venomously, ‘but I have the excuse of not being the spawn of a famously skilled rebel pilot.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Hux lets a savage grin split his features. ‘Word certainly got around fast after your little murder spree on Starkiller. Everybody at the oscillator heard that filth call you his son. Tell me, did Daddy teach you to do anything besides throw tantrums and wield a lightsaber? He obviously didn’t think you worthy of flying spaceships.’

Kylo leaps to his feet, and there’s a silent explosion like that of an ion cannon. A blast wave of energy ripples through the air, throwing Hux like a ragdoll against the wall of the conference room, almost jolting Phasma out of her seat as well. Ren stalks over to where the general lies prostrate on the floor and squats down next to him.

‘How – dare – you-‘ Hux gasps, unable to move.

‘Mention that man again, in this star system or any other, and you will meet the same fate, with or without the Supreme Leader’s sanction.’ Ren doesn’t take his eyes off the general, holding him down with the Force until Phasma clears her throat awkwardly.

Kylo releases the hateful man and stands, turning to the chrome Stormtrooper. ‘I will pass on your instruction the Knights. Until tomorrow.’ He strides from the room, fists clenched.

Hux runs a hand through his ruffled hair, raising his eyebrows at Phasma. ‘I will see that boy excommunicated someday, mark my words.’

Phasma nods, wisely staying silent.

 --

It’s slow going, but the book has enough interesting passages to hold her attention. Rey is three-quarters of the way through when she hits the jackpot. She bends her head closer to the page, scanning the words excitedly.

> **Revan, also known as the Revanchist, the Revan and during his time of rule, Darth Revan, born at the beginning of Year 3994 in the Outer Rim, was a deified Sith Lord who originally studied the ways of the Jedi before the events of the Mandalorian Wars. Following the conflict, Revan reinvented himself as Darth Revan and established the Star Forge space station with a fellow Sith Lord, Darth Malak. However, Darth Revan fell to the temptation of the Light through a Jedi Knight, Bastila Shan, who cannily formed a Force-bond with the dark lord when she healed him after bringing him to the edge of death in combat.**
> 
> **Darth Revan was mind-wiped and reprogrammed by the Jedi Council. The Force-bond between Shan and Revan is thought to be the first occurrence of a bond between a Jedi and a Sith, as typically such connections only existed between a master, Jedi or Sith, and his apprentice. Their link allowed them to communicate through images, thoughts and feelings in combat as well as in daily life. At some point during their partnership, Shan was briefly seduced to the darkness, but was brought back to the light by Revan and the Jedi Council.**
> 
> **Revan later returned naturally to the Dark Side before his eventual death in 3640 BBY. During his reign, he established the Order of Revan and lived through the New Sith Wars.**
> 
> **Darth Revan was an intensely powerful Sith, even referred to at one stage as ‘the heart of the Force’. Due to the duality of his nature, and his training as both Jedi and Sith, he could channel both the light and the darkness concurrently, rather than rely on one side of the Force for power. In his time as a Sith Lord, Revan was a master of telekinesis – even able to wield lightsabers telekinetically; mind-reading, Force-sense and Force-lightning. As a Jedi, he possessed the particular skill of _mechu macture_ , or Ionize, a variation of Force lightning that was able to stun and disable electronic systems, such as droids, while having no effect on humanoids. When used, this variant was very similar to the Force lightning he generated as a Sith Lord, but purple instead of blue. The ability is rare amongst Jedi-**

Rey shuts the book, her mind whirling. Phrases scroll through her memory:

_… due to the duality of his nature… could channel both the light and the darkness…_

_… healed him after bringing him to the edge of death…_

_... a bond between a Jedi and a Sith…_

_... Ionize, a variation of Force lightning… purple instead of blue…_

She calms herself, opens the book again and searches for the chapter she’d been reading. She turns to the next page. And gasps.

There’s a full-page artist’s rendering of Revan, and a woman Rey assumes to be Bastila, done in tasteful black and white. But even without colour she can make out the features on the first page: details of the mask he wears beneath a black cowl, metallic and austere with a slit for eyes. Bastila is dressed in Jedi armour with a flowing skirt over tight breeches, her hair in a bun. And she holds a saber-staff.

Rey’s fingers itch for her own staff, either still inside the Falcon or removed to the First Order arsenal when she had arrived here. She tries to steady her breathing, repeating the refrain Luke had taught her: _There is no emotion. There is peace._

_Calm down, Rey. You’re reading too deeply into this. Ben Solo is not a reincarnation of Revan. And you are not Bastila. The purple lightning was ‘rare amongst Jedi’ but Revan wasn’t the only one to do it._

But there are too many coincidences for her to pretend they don’t exist. She stands up, tears welling in her eyes, and she thinks she’s never wanted to talk to her master more in her life. But, mindful of Snoke’s warning, she closes her mind to the possibility of contact and hurries out of the library, slamming the door behind her.

 


	13. Duality

Kylo arrives back at his rooms before Rey, and he sits down on the couch, head in his hands. So everybody knew, then. _Hux_ knew. By decree of the Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren’s parentage is supposed to have been kept clandestine. He had never minded the circulating rumours about midichlorians – he was happy for those that gossiped to think he had been an immaculate conception, like Vader.

But the truth is out. Everyone knows that Kylo Ren is really Ben Solo, that he had ruthlessly murdered his own father. And he _still_ feels the temptation of the Light. The little scavenger is proof of that. Everything had been royally screwed up, and here he is, being coerced into leading the takeover of a new planet for the First Order, assigned to lure Rey to the Dark side, and genuinely lost in his own uncertainty. For the first time in fifteen years, Kylo Ren is questioning his choices.

Against his will, he slips into reminiscence, his mind unconsciously scrolling through memories from a careless time, his past life - his childhood.

_Ben! The sweet voice caroled, lit with happiness and excitement. ‘Ben, Daddy’s home!’_

_He puts aside the model X-wing he’s been playing with and runs out of the sitting room, little feet carrying him towards the source of his mother’s voice. She’s standing on their balcony, a riot of summer flowers swaying in their pots around her, as if her happiness is the sun and they are opening to receive her light. He feels it too, the purity of the energy she exudes – he has been picking up on these energy currents more and more frequently nowadays, like when he sits outside with the flowers and drinks in their peace, breathing the light as much as the oxygen. Sometimes, too, he can tap into a different type of energy, mostly when his mother takes him on trips into the Galactic City: as they walk past the neon-bright signs of bars and clubs, he can sense an equal and opposite energy there, an absence of light that seems to animate the shadows on the streets, following him back home and whispering to him in his dark bedroom. He’s started sleeping with a night-light, but sometimes that doesn’t chase away the shadows, and his mother will cuddle him to her chest, soothing him as he shakes._

_He shakes now, but with anticipation as his father gallops through the front door, grinning and shaking the dark hair out of his eyes. ‘Leia!’_

_His mother rushes into his arms, kissing his forehead. Ben hangs back, suddenly shy, as his father releases his mother and squats down, beckoning to Ben. Ben walks into his embrace, gripping the collar of his father’s jacket as Han lifts him up, doing the aeroplane even though at six, Ben is far too old for it. He reaches out a hand and touches Han’s cheek, and is surprised to see unfamiliar images and voices suddenly float through his head. He has the distinct sense that he’s looking at something private, not for him, as he recognises the face of Uncle Luke in his father’s mind. They are having a conversation, sitting down at the table on the command deck of his father’s spaceship._

_“He’s an odd kid, Luke… gets nightmares all the time… Leia thinks there’s something wrong with him. She doesn’t say so, but I think she’s worried he’ll end up like… him.”_

‘ ** _NO_!** ’ Ren yells, breaking free of the recollection. His lightsaber surges to life, red-hot light beams funneling out of the quillons at the side, failing to stabilize the volatile crackling of the blade. It had never functioned quite right, but it’s worse now after his duel with Rey on Starkiller, when she had almost snapped the blade in two with Anakin Skywalker’s blue saber. The remembrance of that, of the untrained scavenger besting him in battle and leaving him bleeding in the snow, stirs up anger so deep and painfully hot, it cuts him straight to the core. His father had been concerned that he would turn out like Darth Vader, and he had been proven right. But he would never be _enough_.

And he turns the saber on the wall they’d been pressed against when he’d kissed her, burning an X into the surface. He violently slashes it across the couch cushions where she’d slept; where she’d sent her cry for help to Skywalker; burning away the fabric and letting the feather stuffing spill out onto the floor like viscera.

He is about to set the chair and table on fire when the door whooshes open and Rey barrels in, a vague sense of panic shaking the foundations of the Force bond. She stops in her tracks, taking in the burnt-fabric smell of the room, the disembowelment of the couch cushions.

‘Uh... what’s happening?’ she asks. One eyebrow cocks up. ‘If you wanted to redecorate, there are easier methods than demolishing your furniture.’

‘Leave me alone, Rey,’ he snarls, lightsaber sputtering ominously at his side.

‘I can’t really do that, Kylo,’ she says, frowning. ‘Since I’ve been given orders to sleep here. By you.’

‘Well, now I’m ordering you to get the fuck out.’ But his words are half-hearted, even to his own ears. He switches off the lightsaber. ‘If you have any sense of self-preservation, you’ll run. Right off this space station.’

Rey just blinks at him, her hazel eyes wide in indecision. Her thoughts pummel him suddenly through their connection. _I can’t. I’d love to, but I can’t._

‘Why not?’ he hisses from between clenched teeth. ‘What’s keeping you here, if you loathe me so much?’

Rey nibbles at her lips, and he hates how cute the action is, how it makes him want to crush his mouth against hers, to taste her strange sweetness again. ‘I found out some things while I was in the library. About Force bonds and what ours might mean.’

Kylo groans, running a hand through his tangled curls. ‘I am _not_ in the mood for any more bad news today,’ he warned her.

Rey shrugs. ‘Later, then. Are you going to tell me why you destroyed all your stuff?’

He shakes his head, refusing to answer. ‘A droid will come by in a few hours for dinner. Until then, you can amuse yourself. Just stay out of my way.’

‘All right,’ she says casually. Then, ‘Do you have a bathroom?’

He stares at her. ‘Why?’

‘Why does anybody usually want to use the bathroom?’ she rails back. ‘I need a shower – I haven’t washed since we swam under that waterfall. Or don’t you let your prisoners bathe?’

‘Fine. There’s one attached to the bedroom. Don’t use all the water.’

‘I’ll try,’ Rey says acerbically, opening his bedroom door and disappearing inside the sanctum.

Kylo slumps into the chair he’d nearly wrecked, his thoughts racing. The link between himself and the scavenger widens again, and he catches a glimpse from behind her eyes as she inspects herself in his bathroom mirror. She lifts the dirty dress over her head, exposing an expanse of bronzed skin and the swell of –

He rakes his fingernails up the skin of his arm, leaving tiny marks that blush red from the exertion. _Stop_.

He musters every shred of will he has, and shuts off the mental images, resting his forehead on the table. Would this demon girl ever give him peace?

_Peace is a lie. There is only passion._

 --

Dinner is a silent affair. The service droids have brought them a second chair for the table, along with a feast of crusty bread, midnight black grapes, roast nuna meat and Corellian emerald wine, which Rey sips at enthusiastically, never having had the luxury of alcohol before. Ren is still lost in his reverie, his elegant fingers picking apart the drumstick on his plate, his lips curved downwards in a worried frown.

Rey wants to blurt out what she’s learned about Revan and Bastila, the Force bond, the lightning she can summon on instinct, but she knows it’s wiser to wait for an opportune moment. So she drinks the delicious emerald wine and gnaws on the end of the bread-loaf, marveling at the rich flavours of this food in comparison to the portion packs back on Jakku. She pops a black grape in her mouth, sinking her teeth into it and letting the juice flood her tastebuds. The fact that she hasn’t had to earn this meal, that it had been given to her freely, makes it that much sweeter.

After he’s finished, Kylo Ren stands and walks into his bedroom without a word to Rey. Taking the hint, she goes to lie down on the couch again, sighing as she settles onto the sliced-up seats, a feather tickling the nape of her neck. Her eyes drift closed, and she wades deep into dreams full of people she’s never met, places she’s never been.

_The illustration from the book has been resurrected in her memory, brought to life as she watches from above, seeing two people battling a squad of training droids meant for Padawans ten years of age. A tall, slender man in a brown cloak wields a red lightsaber, the sparks of which illuminate a dark metal mask with a slit for eyes. He is back to back with a petite woman; she is spinning a double-bladed green saber in one hand, darting out and striking at the droids again and again. She laughs as the last droid falls, switches off the saber-staff and turns to the masked man._

_‘All too easy,’ his voice drones from behind the metallic covering._

_The woman stands on tiptoe and removes the mask, exposing the man’s handsome, bearded face, his eyes dancing with amusement. He leans forward as if to kiss her, and the woman steps back._

_‘Revan, no,’ she shakes her head, her voice contrite. ‘You know the rules.’_

_‘I don’t like rules,’ he growls playfully, capturing her in his arms and reeling her in. He pressed his lips against hers, and the dream morphs into another scene: an arena of stone under the open sky, the same two people facing off against eachother. The woman, who must be Bastila, is twirling a red saber-staff now, and her face is full of pity as she addresses Revan._

_‘Look what the Council has done to you. They have turned you into their puppet, as they do to all who are truly strong in the Force. But I have seen into the core of the Force, Revan – you can’t be labelled either light or dark. There is no black or white there, but a rainbow, every colour of the spectrum. There is rage, but there is also calm. There is hate, yet love. I love you, Revan. I don’t need to deny that to myself anymore.’_

_She lowers the saber-staff, and reaches out a hand to him, a silent plea. He takes it. Their lips meet._

‘Rey.’

She jerks awake with a drawn-out, rattling gasp, her eyes skittering across to where her equivalent of Revan is leaning in the doorway to his bedroom. Kylo Ren has removed his cloak and is dressed in just a black undershirt and loose pants. His hair is tousled from the pillow, and he glares sleepily at her from where he stands.

‘You’re projecting your feelings again. I can feel you tossing and turning through the bond.’

‘Yeah?’ Rey grouches. ‘Well, maybe that’s because you hacked up the couch I’m meant to be using as a bed. I’m _so_ sorry for keeping you awake, Your Highness.’

Kylo runs a hand through his curls, a habit Rey is fast growing to recognise as one of agitation or nervousness.

‘Come into my room, then,’ he says reluctantly, his eyes wary underneath the sheen of sleepiness.

Rey gapes at him. ‘Are you insane?’

‘I will be if you don’t let me sleep,’ he snipes. ‘Come in here, Rey. _Now_.’

Like a lamb headed for the slaughter, she stands on slightly quaking knees and walks into Ren’s bedroom. It’s the first time she’s been allowed to see it: minimalist, with dark walls, a closet in the corner, and white sheets on the bed. A completely normal, if plain, bedroom.

‘I’m not going to share a bed with you,’ she announces, turning to face him as he slides between the sheets.

Kylo gives her a cocky smile. ‘Look at all your other options.’

Rey worries at her lower lip, considering. She seized the pillow he wasn’t using and dropped it on the floor. Then she eases herself onto the floor, breath hissing between clenched teeth at the chill of the metal. She keeps her face turned towards Kylo, watching him guardedly from below.

He rolls his eyes. ‘Go to sleep. I wouldn’t dream of doing anything untoward.’

Rey is exhausted, and she feels herself slip toward unconsciousness despite the bizarre scenario of sharing a room with Kylo Ren. As she drifts slowly, her eyelashes fluttering, she thinks she hears Ren speak, his voice colored by laughter: ‘But you would.’

She drops off into a blank, heavy sleep. And before long, the dreams – or nightmares - find her.

\--

_The scene from the arena dissolves, replaced by two figures under an arch of climbing roses. Their faces are shadowed by the awning, but sunlight falls on the dazzling whiteness of a bridal gown, a veil studded with tiny rosebuds, on two pairs of entwined hands. And as the crowd begins to throw confetti, the two figures step out from under the rose arch, arm in arm._

_She sees the sable hair, the dark, intense eyes and the wicked smile as Ren tilts her face up to his. And for some reason, she isn’t surprised to see him. It feels like they’ve been here, that they’ve done this before._

_And then they are in an ornate bedroom, lit candles scenting the air, and he’s pushing her onto the bed, sliding his hands up under the skirt of the wedding dress, stroking the inside of her thighs before gently touching her there, fingers expertly circling her sweet spot. Rey lets out a low, throbbing moan as Ren grabs her face and kisses her hard, biting down on her bottom lip._

_‘Ow,’ she complains, pulling back as he removes his shirt, revealing a scarred, sculpted physique, toughened by battle and dotted with a surprising amount of freckles._

_‘Shut the fuck up,’ he whispers, his lips brushing against hers with stunning familiarity. He slips out of his underwear, and Rey stares at the length of him, rock-hard and ready. He pushes her back onto the pillows, his mouth moving from her lips to her chin to the hollow at the base of her throat, sucking hard at the skin until it purples. Rey gasps, and he lets out a throaty laugh._

_‘You’ve been waiting for this your whole life.’_

_‘Yes,’ she breathes, her legs trembling as he nudges them apart with his knee._

_‘I can take whatever I want,’ he says, his eyes roving over her naked body, from the swell of her small breasts to the curve of her thighs._

_Rey sighs faintly, studying the hard planes of his face, the milky pallor of his skin and the shape of his lips, a perfect cupid’s bow. ‘Take everything.’_

And when Rey wakes up the next morning, a pillow crease denting her cheek, the evidence of her shame soaking her underwear, both the pillow barrier and Kylo Ren are gone.

 


	14. Earthwalker

Kylo arrives at the departures bay at 0330, his Knights of Ren immediately congregating at his side. Technicians are bustling around the hangar, drilling at parts of TIE fighters and transit shuttles, testing the fuel pumps and rotors, sparks of electricity brightening the bay, reflecting of Captain Phasma’s chrome exoskeleton as she strides past the ships, barking instructions.

The Knights are talking amongst themselves behind him, clad in their asymmetric helmets and fuzzy cloaks, looking like poorly designed copies of his appearance. Kylo grips the hilt of his saber as Phasma walks over to him.

‘I’ll be sending you out on one of the last transit shuttles,’ she informs him. ‘There are too many Knights for a TIE fighter, and I want your squad to be among the last on ground zero at dawn. Stormtroopers are replaceable, but the Knights are too precious to lose’

Kylo inclines his head. ‘Fair enough. Have you checked the inventory?’

‘Yes. If you’d like, you can come and choose a second weapon. That lightsaber may break yet,’ she says, an odd tone in her mechanized voice. Kylo follows her across to a transit shuttle that has been stocked with spare weapons – flamethrowers, ion cannons, blasters and laser guns.

Kylo takes a small blaster from the rack, tucking the barrel into a pocket of his robe. Phasma nods in approval, then pauses. Ren can feel her hesitancy; it glistens and shifts around her like a mirage.

‘Ren?’ She doesn’t say anything for a long beat. Then her shoulders slump and she says, ‘Be careful out there today. There are some… who would be happy to see you injured, or worse.’

Kylo snorts derisively. ‘Hux? He’s so far from a threat that it’s laughable.’

‘Even so. Watch your back. _And_ your front.’

She strides off, armour shining under the halogen lights. Kylo stays in the transit shuttle for a time, examining the variety of firearms, but eventually returns to his Knights as they prepare to board the first fleet of shuttles.

‘The voyage will take an hour, and we are dropping troops at the ambush site shown on the map inside your shuttles. Make sure you have readied your weapons before you exit the shuttle, and you have full license to open fire at the first sign of resistance from the natives. First tactical squads, please board your vessels now.’ Phasma waves them to their respective spaceships.

After an eternity of waiting, Ren and the Knights trudge up the ramp and onto their transit shuttle, and Kylo can’t help wondering what Rey is doing now. He’d left her snoring quietly in his bedroom; her face had been so serene as he’d walked out the door. What was she dreaming about?

He sits down on one of the benches of the shuttle, closing his eyes and meditating behind his mask. He searches for her Force signature through their link, seeking that opalescent lightness that is her insignia. Finding it, he hopes it won’t be as painful this time around. He immerses himself in her Light, the shadows inside him shrinking away from the warmth and the innocence, as he enters her dream world.

_‘You’ve been waiting for this your whole life.’_

_‘Yes,’ Rey says breathily, and her legs tremble with a mixture of desire and fear as he pushes them apart with one knee._

_‘I can take whatever I want,’ he says, letting his eyes move from her deliciously pink nipples to the slick moisture of her entrance._

_Rey sighs faintly. ‘Take everything.’_

_Ren stares from an unseen vantage point as Rey imagines him sinking into her, stretching her in new ways as he roughly seizes her hips and thrusts against her, into her, again and again, his black hair falling over both their faces and his hands gripping her arms hard enough to leave fingerprint bruises. She has envisioned his hands in exquisite detail, he notices – every fingernail and palm line clearly defined, spread over the smoothness of her skin as he plunges into her. Ren can feel the barest ghost of friction in his underwear, and he feels himself growing hard underneath his robes, fighting the urge to touch himself right there on the space shuttle in plain sight of his Knights._

_They’re losing what little rhythm they had established, Rey letting out an absolutely obscene moan, tangling her fingers in his hair as she clamps down around his cock. And in that moment he swears he can_ feel _it, the_ sensation _of her orgasm, and his mind is enveloped in white nothingness._

_They come together, her loudly, her imagining Ren as silent and shuddering. He feels the disconnect as she wakes up, sharing her feelings of profound shame and self-disgust, replaced by confusion as she realizes he’s missing._

‘ _Fuck_ ,’ Kylo whispers as the visualization fades, leaving him with an erection so hard it _aches_. He can’t believe it. He knows from Snoke’s insight that they’d shared the dream on Felucia, and knows that it’s a result of the Force bond, but this? She’d dreamed this of her own accord, in the blackness of his bedroom.

Focus, he needs to focus. He’s about to be deployed along with the rest of the Knights, and as welcome as Rey’s distraction is, now is not the time. He concentrates on his instructions, silently spelling out each word of the orders until the blood returns fully to his brain. Then he stands up and addressed his Knights.

‘We’re due to land very shortly, and this is a hostile world we are about to colonize. And while the battle may be mostly over, there is still work to be done. When Supreme Leader Snoke assigned me to command this operation, he said that he wanted a bloodbath. So let’s give him what he wants. No mercy, no prisoners, and no survivors. Kill anything that moves. Am I clear?’

The Knights raise the hilts of their weapons, toasting him. Kylo Ren sits back down and waits as the shuttle begins its descent through Felucia’s ionosphere, mentally boxing up all memory of Rey’s dream and shoving it into the furthest corner of his mind. He’s become a master at compartmentalizing over the years, burying every memory or emotion that isn’t hatred or determination, paring him down to an entity of pure, thoughtless destruction. He does this now, readying himself for battle in the best way he knows: becoming Snoke’s war machine.

The shuttle hovers a foot from the forest floor, and the ramp opens. The Knights start to jump out, and Kylo hangs back, waiting for the ramp to touch ground before he descends, igniting his saber. There’s a cacophony unlike the one he remembers, not natural sounds – just the screams of the natives and the shouted communications of the Stormtroopers; the whistling of TIE-fighter shells dropping on their targets; the deep booming of ion cannons and the crackle of a thousand tiny fires sparking in the wreckage of the forest. _Warfare_. The chaos of it all gives him a savage sort of joy.

He won’t need the blaster – he can feel a change in the energy of the planet, more filaments of Dark running through the tapestry of the Force than when he had last been here. Perhaps it’s Rey’s absence, or the death toll of a battle whose ripples would be felt throughout the galaxy for thousands of years. Either way, he drinks the pool of darkness in.

His heightened senses alert him to movement in the bushes to his left. With an ululating cry, a bloodied warrior bursts out of the foliage, throwing a javelin. Kylo deflects the spear with his saber and lunges at his would-be attacker, crisscrossing his lightsaber faster than a cobra’s strike, slashing three gaping incisions in the Felucian’s neck, shoulder and chest. Deep navy blood gushes from the wounds, and the alien cries out and collapses at his feet.

The Knights of Ren are studying at him, and Kylo kicks the corpse aside and sets off deeper into the forest, all six of his men falling into line behind him. As they march past the lifeless bodies of animals and aliens, Kylo recognises the melon-trees from his and Rey’s trek, remembering throwing fruit at the annoying monkeys that are now missing from the treetops. There is no life here. Sunlight dapples the plants, puddling on the ground like molten gold, but even sunshine has different connotations when the stench of blood and petroleum is on the breeze.

They move on, their roundabout path bringing them to the clearing with the swaying pink blossom-tree. It seems empty, and the Knights walk forward in V formation, with Kylo at the helm.

A lone figure emerges from behind the trunk, her bony form festooned with bead jewellery and feathers. The shaman of the _Maralii_ tribe. She holds up a closed hand, and Ren signals to his knights to stop. She poses no threat, so they draw back.

The shaman slowly walks towards Ren, and he steps out from the pack of Knights, meeting her in the middle of the clearing. She stares right through the mask, her carnelian eyes piercing through him.

‘So your beginning is to be my end,’ the shaman soliloquizes in that lilting, hesitant tongue. ‘The earth that saved you, that bled to keep you alive, you would desecrate. You would destroy the people who sheltered you, who agreed to help you? Are all humans such monsters?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Ren says conversationally. He twirls his lightsaber in a show of intimidation. ‘But most of the time, yes.’

The shaman stares at him unblinkingly, her brow furrowed in thought, seemingly unconcerned by the screams of falling missiles behind her, the shockwaves of detonation, the towers of smoke that are beginning to twist up beyond the treeline. ‘A monster, but a man….’ she sighs. ‘But I see what I failed to see the night we rescued you: that the light that was so blinding in the girl is within you, as well. It is well-disguised, and burns like a nova inside a black sphere of hatred, but it is not extinguished.’

‘There is light buried in you, child, and I see you for exactly what you are. _I see you.’_ She extends her arm to him, and opens her hand to reveal a crushed spore from the _Maralii_ tree. ‘Our _Gods_ see the light in you.’

‘ _There is no light_ ,’ Kylo Ren seethes, and he strikes, his blade tearing through tendon and bone, cleaving her outstretched arm from her shoulder.

The shaman cries out, but her screams are muted by the buzzing white noise that fills his ears, the crawling shadows that had been beneath the surface since he was six years old wrapping around his brainstem, blinding him to everything but his grip on the lightsaber and the inexplicable wetness on his cheeks as he swings again and again.

His saber meets no more resistance, and Kylo Ren falls to his knees in the dirt, dropping the lightsaber and drawing ragged gasps of oxygen behind the mask. He can’t _breathe_ : the blackness of the Force – if it is the Force - has possessed and crowded every cell of his body, leaving no room for air, for thought.

The Knights, the dead shaman, and the grass under his hands – everything has dissolved in the impenetrable nightfall. He vaguely knows that he’s having some sort of breakdown: he feels like he is crawling in his own skin, sucked into the black hole of a power too strong for him, drowning in the undertow of an endless darkness. He fights his body’s urge to vomit, or to pass out.

Gradually, a red film creeps back through the absence of light, and his vision returns. He sees his gloves, sticky with blue blood, the charred briquette of the shaman’s body, her sightless eyes. What he’s done. He knows the worst of himself, then, and he sees it all through a filter of red, like cellophane over the eyes of his mask.

A watery sun begins to peek out over the scene of the bloodbath, shades of tangerine, lemon and grapefruit blending into a citrus sunrise. Dawn has broken.

And as Kylo gets to his feet and turns to face the Knights, they give a collective shout and point at him.

He glances down at himself.

Glowing spores from the _Maralii_ tree are floating down from the sky, collecting silently on the shoulders of his cloak, on his arms; gathering on the tips of his boots and the fingers of his gloves. More and more of the microorganisms cluster around him, on him, until all the Knights can see is an iridescent orb of light.

_There is light in you._

And underneath the helmet, Kylo Ren lets out a small, muffled sob.

 

 


	15. The Monster I Made

Rey awakes for the second time that morning, stirred into consciousness by the despondent cry of thousands of voices, harmonizing from somewhere _inside_ the Force. She reaches out for the Light and feels a profound loss wash over her; and, unable to locate the source of the feeling, she sits up on the metal floor, bones protesting.

Kylo Ren is still missing, so she had all of the bed to herself if she wants it, but she doesn’t feel like sleeping. An inkling of where he might be creeps into her mind, and she puts two and two together to form a conclusion that she very much hopes is wrong.

She throws on her old beige trousers and shirt, hurrying out into the living room to where a service droid is waiting to serve her breakfast.

‘Good morning, mistress-‘

‘Where is Kylo Ren?’ she asks urgently, bending down to meet the droid’s fish-eye lens.

‘All available troops have been sent to Felucia on the orders of General Hux,’ the droid replies neutrally. ‘That is all the information I can share freely as a service droid.’

‘What are they doing on Felucia?’ Rey grips the droid by its armlike prongs, and its repeated insistence that it couldn’t tell her is all the answer she needs. They’d stormed the planet for the First Order’s purposes; she knows it innately.

As it whirrs out of the room, Rey’s legs turn to jelly and she sinks to the floor, tuning in to the terrified vocalisations again. She recognises the sounds for what they are: swan songs of a vanishing race _. Death_. Something terrible has happened in the galaxy.

 --

She doesn’t know how long she sits still, listening to the endless lament, until the link starts to warm and resonate, and she knows Kylo Ren is drawing close. She stands up, waiting with tear-stained cheeks for him to walk through the door.

As soon as she closes her eyes, the door opens, and there he is. Splattered in dark blue blood, his breath rattling through the voice-changer of his helmet. She can _smell_ the slaughter on him, the horrendous stench of bloody, violent death. She steps back from him, backing into the wall.

‘What have you done, Ben?’ she whispers.

He doesn’t respond except to remove the mask, letting it drop to the floor. Unmasked, he’s pale as a wraith, what little flush of colour he normally has drained from his face. His eyes are darker and more full of pain than any creature she’s ever seen, his lashes wet and stuck together with tears.

He raises one of his blood-slicked gloves, staring at it with an expression close to wonder. She can feel the turmoil of his emotions: the guilt, the confusion, and the sorrow commingling into a maelstrom of feeling that nearly drowns her.

‘ _What have you done_?’ She screams it to the heavens, to whatever gods are listening. She slides down the wall, clutching her head between her hands, shaking and weeping uncontrollably. Tears splash down her face as she raises it to meet his. ‘Did… did the First Order kill the Felucians, Kylo?’

He lets out a choked-off noise that could have been the beginning of a laugh or a sob. His voice is hollow as it comes through the bond.

_It was… for the advancement of the First Order._

_‘Fuck_ the First Order _!_ ’ she cries. ‘How much blood is on their hands, Kylo Ren? How much is on _yours_?’ She draws in a shaking breath, feeling her foundations crumble, the tension between them reaching fever pitch. ‘ _Did you kill the people who helped us?’_

‘They weren’t people.’ Ren mutters.

 _‘I saved you too!’_ Rey howls, the sound so shrill that it sets Kylo’s teeth on edge. ‘ _I saved your life, and look what you’ve done with it!’_ She sobs inconsolably, and the very air around her seems to quake and tremble as she calls to the Force, letting her thunderous anger gather before hurling a zigzag of the purple lightning at Ren with all her strength, sending him flying across the room, hitting the opposite wall with a crack that splits the plaster. He slithers down onto the floor and lies still, blood beginning to drip from his nose.

Horrified, Rey crawls over to him on hands and knees, still crying unrestrainedly. The loss of life sent shock after shock through her being, the web that is the Force alight with hundreds of new souls. She dabs at Kylo’s bleeding nose with her shirtsleeve, then rocks back on her heels, wiping away her tears and snot; muttering to herself.

‘I saved the life of a monster. Why am I surprised that he would continue to be monstrous?’

Kylo lets out a low groan, rolling onto his side.

‘ _Genocide_ ,’ Rey whispers, tasting the bitterness of the word, of what she’s indirectly caused by giving Kylo Ren another chance at life.

 _You should die for what you’ve done,_ she thinks, and his eyes flutter open, liquid brown and filling with tears.

_I know._

_I have had so many chances to kill you._ She reaches out with the hands that had both hurt and healed him; to touch the jagged scar she’d marked his face with, so long ago. _I wanted to on Starkiller. A voice tempted me to. And when you fell out of the blossom-tree on Felucia, bloodless and close to death, the same voice told me to stand by and watch you perish._

Kylo sits up slowly, crossing his legs, not breaking their shared gaze. _Why didn’t you?_

Rey knuckles at her eyes, trying to stem the steady drip of tears. _Because that would have made me just like you. I could kill Kylo Ren. But I can’t kill Ben Solo._

She hasn’t removed her hand from his face, her thumb stroking the raised, mauve skin of the scar. And when Kylo Ren lifts his own hand to her cheek to catch a lone teardrop, the wreckage of the room disappears, and they sink into their connection, the Force bond that links the Dark and the Light.

Kylo plummets into the brightness of her mind, the opalescence making the ghosts inside him shriek and run for cover. He is freefalling, deeper inside her thoughts than he has ever been in anyone he’s interrogated, and he is awed by the brilliant essence of her; her purity and her passion, her mistaken belief that there was still good buried somewhere inside him, now burned away to a tiny scrap of hope by his actions. Staring into the core of her is like looking at an imploding sun, and he can’t last for long against her Light. He gasps and resurfaces, almost blinded.

At the same time, Rey is sliding through their bond and into Kylo’s mind. She slips beneath the black veil of his surface thoughts, and into the innermost core of him, his Darkness enfolding her, pulsing around her, trying to hold her back from seeing his true brokenness. But she fights, falling further, and gets her first glimpse of the heart of him, recoiling instantly from the raw, wounded thing. She knows that if she touches that part of him, that open, gaping sore, she’ll see things she can never forget. But despite every instinct telling her to, she doesn’t flinch away.

She reaches out to touch the heart of Kylo Ren, guiding herself through solidified darkness to reach his deepest regrets, the foulest acts: cold-blooded murders, the seeping stains of lies upon lies, the excruciating memory of his lightsaber driving through Han Solo’s back flickering before her eyes.

She explores further, waving aside the writhing shadows that coalesce at the blackest part of him, blocking something from her view: the tiny, yet fiercely burning light at the back of his mind. She feels her own light drawn to the small, glimmering globe, and as she brushes against it, spools of feelings and thoughts unraveling from the orb like embroidery thread: summer flowers, the feeling of pure, childlike joy when he reaches out to the Force and it answers his call, his old dreams for a future that have been long since crushed by the darkness, but linger here at this stubborn source of light.

She withdraws slowly, rewinding through their connection until she can see only what’s in front of her in this reality. Their hands are still cradling eachother’s faces, and Rey feels wetness on her fingertips as tears seep from beneath Ren’s closed eyelids. She starts to talk again, half to herself.

‘I want to hate you, Ben Solo. But I can’t. I can’t forgive you for the things you’ve done, but for some godforsaken reason it still doesn’t stop me from hoping you’ll change. I just… don’t understand you. I don’t think I ever will.’

Ren’s eyes open, glistening and dark with an emotion she can't place.

‘Would you like to?’

There’s a disconnect inside her then, and the world inverts itself.

She focuses only on that speck of Light she’d seen in him, trying to nurture it, grow it with her own Light as she crushes her lips against his, her mouth opening to invite his tongue inside. Kylo moans quietly as she kisses him with vehemence, knotting her fingers in his raven curls and tugging hard enough to hurt. She deepens the kiss as his hands move from her face to her breasts, rubbing them roughly over the material of her shirt.

He slides a hand underneath to push aside the cloth binding her breasts, tracing the twin swells, the furrow between them. She mirrors his actions, slipping her hand under his robes and peeling back his undershirt to touch the hard planes of his chest. She throws one of her legs across until she’s sitting astride him on the floor, and as she kisses him again, he bites her lip hard, just as he had done in the filthy dream. She doesn’t protest.

A sudden rapping on the door interrupts them, and Rey rolls off him onto the floor with a grunt of exertion. He lets out an impressive stream of expletives and raises himself off the floor, arms shaking slightly.

‘Lord Ren?’ The muffled voice of a Stormtrooper can be heard outside the door.

‘ _What?!_ ’ Kylo bellows, waving the door open without remembering to put his helmet on. If the two Stormtroopers outside hadn’t been wearing their own helmets, Rey’s sure their faces would be frozen in cartoonish expressions of shock.

‘What could _possibly_ be important enough to warrant disturbing me in my private rooms?’ Ren fumes, glaring at the subordinates in turn. The troopers quail inside their armour.

‘General Hux has requested your presence in conference room 21B. He said it was urgent, sir. He sent us to fetch you.’

Ren clenches his fists. ‘I am perfectly capable of finding the conference room alone. Leave, and tell General Hux that next time he wants to disrupt me in such a fashion, he would be wise to send a droid. They at least can be pieced back together.’

He shuts the door with a simple hand movement, and Rey hears the Stormtroopers walking away, rather faster than their usual marching tread. She smiles ruefully.

‘Do you get a kick out of terrorizing people? Those poor Stormtroopers looked ready to soil their plastoid plates.’

‘I’m not going to dignify that with a response.’ He jams the helmet over his still-tousled hair and straightens his clothes. The ugly mask turns her way for a second, eliciting a thrill of fear even after all that has just passed between them.

As Kylo Ren strides out of the room, he leaves Rey with flesh memories of his lips on hers, the feel of his soft hair twined through her fingers, the tiny spark of light she’d found in the cesspools of his darkness. She shakes her head, unable to process everything that has transpired since Leia had sent her to retrieve him from Felucia. It had only been a _week_! Seven days was all it had taken before she had given in to the bizarre attraction and kissed a murderer. A Dark Side zealot who had tortured and endangered her friends, and threatened to kill her on more than one occasion.

_What the hell are you doing, Rey?_

 

 

 

 


	16. Retribution

Kylo Ren walks into a roomful of anarchy. Commanders and lietenants are arguing over sheets of data printouts spread over the conference table, probe droids and computers are beeping loudly in binary, Phasma and Hux are talking heatedly in the corner, and the tension in the air is tangible.

Kylo stomps over to the pasty-faced warlord. ‘General Hux. What is the matter?’

Hux turns sharply to face him, making no attempt to hide his disdain. ‘While you were off having your little heart-to-heart with the Jakku scavenger, my men picked up scans of five Resistance starships, flying over Felucia and our space station. My first thought was that the Resistance must have been informed about the battle this morning and were sending aid. But our navigators have informed me that reaching this system is a two-day journey from D’Qar, where we believe the rebel base to be. Thus, the Resistance must have already been tipped off about our whereabouts. Do you have any idea who could have facilitated this, Ren?’

Hux stares daggers at his rival, and Kylo doesn’t have a response. Is it true? Had Rey managed to communicate her location to Skywalker when she’d performed the Force-sending? Will the Resistance storm the _Dahlia_ and take her back?

‘Neither Moraband nor the _Dahlia_ are well-fortified enough to defend against a full-scale assault by the rebels. We lost valuable infrastructure and technology in the implosion of Starkiller Base. And now it seems your precious pet has revealed our weakness to the enemy. You were stupid beyond measure to bring her here.’

Hux is no Force-sensitive acolyte, but he can _feel_ the contained anger coming from Ren, like lit fireworks in a metal box. He knows full well that he is poking the colloquial sleeping dragon, but continues anyway. ‘I hope your little flirtations were worth compromising the First Order, and all your comrades. The Supreme Leader has not been informed yet, but when he is-‘

‘The orders to bring Rey aboard were given by the Supreme Leader himself,’ Ren hisses, stepping closer to Hux until they’re chest to chest.

Hux sniffs. ‘Be that as it may, I highly doubt that the Supreme Leader intended for you to give her free rein. For instance, it was reported to me yesterday that she was wandering the premises without an escort, exploring our library and other areas on her own. Did it never occur to you that she could be casing the joint?’

Kylo snickers at the general’s use of the cliché. This only serves to incense Hux further, his face creasing with unbridled fury as he opens his mouth to yell.

He never gets the chance. The beeping of the computers rises to a cybernetic scream, and the space station shakes as something pierces their shields and sends a stunning blow to the outside walls. Klaxon alarms start to bark in the hallways, and one of Hux’s lietenants barrels into the room.

‘They’re cloaked, sir! We didn’t even see it coming. We don’t know how many are out there, but they’re coming hard and fast and we’re under heavy fire.’

Hux snaps into action. ‘Engage them. I want every squadron dispatched now! Full license to use the turbo lasers, cannons, whatever necessary if they come into range. Go!’

The lieutenant races from the room, Hux and Phasma in hot pursuit. Kylo rushes out too, headed in the opposite direction, towards Snoke’s throneroom. He steels himself as he hastens, preparing himself for Snoke’s probable wrath. Rey had betrayed them, betrayed _him_. He hates her.

He speeds past the Stormtroopers guarding his master’s chambers, and stops at the foot of the platform. ‘Supreme Leader-‘

‘I already know,’ Snoke cuts him off, his holographic face twisting into an ugly grimace. ‘I feared this would happen when the girl sent out her message in the night. Luke Skywalker never did learn to respect authority.’

‘Master, I am sorry-‘

‘Be silent, Ren, you sniveling fool,’ Snoke thunders, rising from his throne and towering imperiously over Kylo. ‘You have failed me in every way imaginable. I have been privy to your awkward little trysts with the girl. You have not seduced her to the Dark Side; she has seduced _you_. She is strong and you are weak, despite the decades of training and effort I put into reforming you. You are an unworthy apprentice, and the First Order is paying for your mistakes.’

The space station shifts as another blast shakes the structure, and the hologram of the Supreme Leader flickers, malfunctioning.

‘Flee!’ Snoke shouts, his voice cracking. ‘If you want to salvage the last crumbs of faith I have in you, subdue the girl and bring her to me on Moraband.’ The hologram shorts out, the room plunged into pitch darkness in the absence of the blue light beams.

Kylo Ren stumbles from the room, breaking into a run as the station descends into chaos around him. The loudspeakers are blaring the same message over and over:

**“ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO THE DEPARTURES BAY. RESISTANCE FIGHTERS HAVE COMPROMISED THIS SPACE STATION. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO THE DEPARTURES BAY.”**

 --

Rey jumps up as the door to Ren’s room slides open and he charges in, still wearing the helmet.

‘Kylo, what’s going on? The loudspeaker’s all fuzzy in here and alarms keep going off-‘

‘We’re leaving,’ he tells her, snatching her arm and towing her out the door.

‘Ouch, you’re hurting me! _Why_ are we leaving?’ She wrests her arm from his grip and stops in the middle of the corridor, her face tinged scarlet as the red alert lights flash above them.

‘I don’t have time to explain it – just _come on_!’ Ren yells, his frustration evident as he makes a grab for her hand again. And the loudspeaker crackled to life again, repeating the message she hadn’t been able to hear from Kylo’s room.

**“ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO THE DEPARTURES BAY. RESISTANCE FIGHTERS HAVE COMPROMISED THIS SPACE STATION. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO THE DEPARTURES BAY.”**

‘The Resistance?’ Rey breathes, her eyes sparkling. Kylo seizes her shoulders, irate.

‘Yes, the Resistance. You tipped them off, didn’t you? Traitor!’

Rey narrows her eyes at him, letting out a small huff of laughter. ‘I’m no traitor. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m ‘rebel scum’ too. I have no loyalty to the First Order.’

‘I’m not talking about the fucking _First Order_ ,’ Ren snarls, and Rey can feel his hurt through their link. He thinks that she’s betrayed _him_ , she realizes. The idea is absurd!

She laughs haughtily. ‘The day I rescued you on Felucia, you told me that my kindness changed nothing, that we would still be enemies. Forgive me for treating you as an enemy, Kylo. I just do what I’m told.’

She turns her back on him and starts to walk away. In a last-ditch effort, Kylo raises the hilt of his switched-off lightsaber and cracks the metal tube hard across the back of her skull. She drops like a stone.

Kylo scoops her up into his arms and _runs_ ; barely keeping himself upright as the space station shudders with near-constant blasts from the Resistance’s cannons. They are overwhelmed, and the message on the loudspeaker has changed.

**“EVACUATE! EVACUATE! THIS SPACE STATION HAS BEEN BOARDED BY RESISTANCE FIGHTERS. ALL REMAINING STAFF ARE TO BOARD EMERGENCY VESSELS AND EVACUATE THE STATION.”**

Ren reaches out to the Force, expanding his spatial awareness until the space station zooms out like a blueprint behind his eyes, with a few glowing dots showing the remaining life forms aboard the ship. He focuses on the Force symbol he can sense inside the departures bay, and blinks in shock, the map disappearing from his consciousness. There’s no way…

He turns a corner, running into the hangar, still carrying Rey in his arms, and he is proven right.

His mother – Leia Organa - steps out from behind a stack of fuel tanks at the opposite end of the bay. She’s wearing a green flight suit, her hair pulled into the trademark buns at her ears. Her face, though aged fifteen years and wrinkled, is taut with anger as she aims a blaster gun at his head.

‘Ben! _Put her down._ ’ Her voice multiplies as it bounces off the metal walls of the hangar, mingling with the echo of the loudspeaker message.

‘Very brave of you to come here, General,’ Kylo Ren sneers as Leia starts to walk towards him, the hand that points the blaster quivering. ‘In my experience, the commanders leave confrontation to their underlings.’

‘This is the Resistance, Kylo Ren – not your soulless empire. We give a shit about our soldiers.’

‘How touching,’ Ren says mockingly, readjusting Rey in his arms. ‘It’s been lovely to catch up, General, but I am needed elsewhere. The scavenger and I are leaving. You would be wise not to try to stop us.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Leia growls. ‘I _will_ shoot you.’

‘You won’t,’ Ren disagrees lightly, and he backs away, heading for the one of the last tethered TIE fighters.

He knows the instant she squeezes the trigger. With clear and precise movements, Ren raises a hand and stops the laser pulse in midair, holding it for a second before redirecting it back at his mother. The beam rebounds off the metal floor and against the walls, showering sparks before it flies out the open bay door, vanishing like a shooting star.

‘Ben!’ Leia yells as he approaches the ladder of the TIE fighter, depositing Rey at the bottom. ‘You don’t have to do this!’

‘ _Shut up_!’ Kylo roars, and without turning around he lifts a hand and throws a Force blast so powerful that it flings Leia ten feet into the air. She slams back to the ground with a thud that dents the metal floor. Kylo glances over his shoulder for a half second, just to check –

And a brilliant bolt of pain scores across the back of his calves. He cries out, dropping to his knees as his legs give way, and the unseen thing rips another burning gash through his back. And when the rogue Stormtrooper moves out from behind the oxygen tank next to the ladder, his unmasked face twisted into a savage grin, Kylo realizes that Leia had been a decoy, and he has played right into her hands.

‘That’s for landing me in a bacta tank for two months, asshole,’ FN-2187 pants, gesturing at Ren’s charred flesh with his lightsaber. ‘And this is for Rey.’

Before he can react, FN-2187 stabs the saber’s beam into the meat of Kylo’s shoulder, keeping it there until the blood boils and the saber tip has pierced all the way through, and black pinholes bloom in Ren’s vision, overtaking his sight.

 --

Finn switches off the impaling blade and kicks the unconscious dark knight. He can’t help but rejoice – the ambush had worked, against all odds! They’d liberated Chewbacca and BB8 after storming the cellblock (not hard to do when the blown-up space station had been mostly evacuated) and now Rey was finally safe. There’s so much to catch up on when she regains consciousness.

Leia walks unsteadily over to the TIE fighter, her usually calm face displaying a range of emotions too complex for words. She kneels down by the comatose body of Kylo Ren, hesitating a minute before fiddling with the helmet, gently removing it and staring wonderously at the face underneath. She brushes an errant black curl from Ren’s forehead, whispering something that sounds sort of like a lullaby.

‘General?’ Finn asks, touching the older woman’s shoulder.

‘He wasn’t always like this,’ Leia murmurs, tracing the pink scar that bisects Ren’s face from chin to eyebrow. ‘Oh, God… I barely recognise his face.’

‘Come on, ma’am,’ Finn sticks out a hand to help her up, but Leia waves him off, collecting herself.

‘I’m sorry, Finn. The last thing we need is to go to pieces right now. Where’s that Wookiee? I told him to stick close. Chewie!’ she calls, and Chewbacca lopes over from where he was inspecting the Falcon, which is parked in the corner of the hangar, looking very run-down and much like the bucket of bolts she had once christened it as.

‘It’s missing pieces? OK, we’ll tow it onto the freighter. Can you carry the boy?’

Chewie roars.

‘Good. Take Rey too – Finn and I will leave with Poe once he flies in. We’ll attach a towing line to the Falcon and you just sit tight with Rey and Ben. Oh, and tie him up, won’t you?’

Chewie gathers the two humans in his arms and strides off. Leia watches them go until her best pilot’s X-wing zooms into the hangar, skidding across the metal floor on rubber wheels before Poe leaps out, a wide grin stretching his face and instantly making everybody more cheerful.

‘Alrighty, guys. Ready to tear shit up?’

‘We’ve already done that part,’ Finn teases, an affectionate, puppy-dog look coming over him as he banters with Poe. ‘Get with the damn program, Dameron.’

‘The day’s not over yet, pal.’ Poe gives Finn a one-armed hug, and Leia smiles to herself as she picks up on the chemistry between them.

‘Come on, boys. Let’s go home.’

  

 


	17. Eulogy

Rey opens her eyes to a sky-blue ceiling. She blinks lethargically, slowly regaining visual and mental acuity, the room sharpening in focus to reveal a handsome, dark-skinned man sleeping on a chair at her bedside. _Bedside_? She turns her head, wincing at the dull pain the movement evokes, and scans her surroundings.

She is in the medical bay of a ship, with random aches in her shoulder, legs and back, not to mention a lump on the back of her skull that feels like she’s been hit with a sledgehammer. Finn is next to her. It isn’t the _Falcon_ or the _Dahlia_. That’s all she knows.

‘Where am I?’ she asks Finn, whose head jerks up in surprise.

‘You’re awake!’

‘Thank you, Captain Obvious. But seriously, where am I?’ She thinks for a moment, skimming over the details of the previous few days. ‘And where’s Kylo Ren?’

Finn grins mischievously. ‘He’s in the brig. Or the freighter’s equivalent. Licking his wounds, no doubt.’

Rey raises her eyebrows skeptically. ‘What did you do to him?’

‘Oh, nothing much. A lightsaber to the legs, back and shoulder. No more than that dickhead deserves.’

Rey snorts. ‘No wonder I hurt all over, then. Phantom pain.’

‘We gave you both some bacta patches, but there’s not much more I can do til we reach Lothal.’ Finn handed her an energy pudding pack.

‘Not D’Qar?’ Rey rips open the pudding pack and chews on the chocolatey substance.

‘The First Order knows about D’Qar. We just bombed the shit out of their space station, so we’re expecting them to take some form of revenge. They wouldn’t be the Dark side if they didn’t. So we’ve left D’Qar – Lothal was the compromise the Resistance agreed on.’

‘Okay.’ Rey finished the pudding and lay back down on her stretcher. ‘Seen any Nerfs yet? Are they as smelly as everyone says?’

Finn roars with laughter. ‘The General says they stink worse than Han when he’s returned from a smuggling operation.’

Rey smiles awkwardly at the mention of the name, and the painful memories it triggers: Han grudgingly offering her a job on the Falcon, telling her that Chewie liked her. The gang rescuing her on Starkiller, Han admitting that she knew her way around electronics – for a girl. Finn seems to be feeling the same thing, because he speaks up.

‘He used to call me Big Deal,’ he says quietly, a melancholy smile playing at the corners of his lips. ‘He just somehow knew I wasn’t really with the Resistance, but he played along anyway until I was ready to own up to it. And he was so damn full of life – always cracking jokes, always defying belief. When we came to rescue you on Starkiller, he set the ship to land at _lightspeed_ – I don’t know anybody who’s ballsy enough to do that, and that’s coming from someone who’s friends with Poe freaking Dameron.’

Rey can’t help smirking at that admission. ‘I think Poe wants to be a little more than your _friend_ , Finn.’

Finn blinks at her, shocked. ‘What? No! We’re buddies is all.’

‘Really? Unless things have changed since I last visited D’Qar, the man is head over heels for you. You’d have to be just about the most oblivious person in the galaxy not to notice.’

Finn’s cheeks are blushing berry-red. ‘Leave it, Rey,’ he says gruffly. ‘You’re imagining things.’

Rey takes the hint. ‘Well, when you live alone on a desert planet for years, you tend to develop a good imagination.’

Finn smiles back, standing up from the chair and stretching. ‘Wow. I was in that chair for hours. I gotta get something to eat. Will you be fine here?’

‘Please. I’m barely even scratched. Bacta’s one hell of a drug.’

Finn leaves the med-bay, and Rey lies still, retreating into her mind and mentally prodding at the Force-bond, exploring its depth now that she has free time. It’s just as strong as ever – she can sense that Kylo is restrained at the opposite end of the ship, in a room very similar to hers. _The freighter must have more than one med-bay, then. State of the art._ He isn’t asleep, but he isn’t fully awake. He’s meditating, she can perceive the darkness that he folds closer to himself, breathing it in as he chants the mantra of the Sith under his breath. She listens to the words; polar opposite and yet so similar to the Jedi Code she had learned by rote. _Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me…_

‘Rey?’ the General’s voice breaks her concentration, and she withdraws from the link.

‘Hello, General. It’s wonderful to see you. I can’t thank you enough for rescuing me… us.’ Rey sat up in bed again as Leia walked over to take the seat Finn had vacated.

‘Thank you, Rey.’ Leia inclines her head. ‘But I didn’t come here to receive thanks. I came to apologise to you personally.’

Rey frowns. ‘Why?’

‘Rey, I – I sent you to Felucia under false pretenses. I wanted you to find my son and bring him home. I had a vision of him dying and… well, I’d like to tell myself I did what any mother would have done. But I was selfish, and I almost sent you to your death.’

Rey stretched out and touched the General’s arm in solidarity. ‘General-‘

‘You can call me Leia. I think you’ve earned that right.’

‘Leia. I knew as soon as we neared the planet – I sensed Ren… _Ben_ there. But I would have gone anyway if you’d asked, so it doesn’t matter. And ironically, we did complete your initial mission. We destroyed the active battle droids.’

Leia’s mouth twists, hardly registering Rey’s words. ‘Before my son kidnapped you for his vile master. Rey, I was so unbelievably foolish. I thought… that there might be something between you. I thought that he would not betray you as he betrayed his father. But my eyes have been opened now, after the atrocities on Felucia. My little boy is well and truly gone. Irredeemable. The things he’s… oh, God.’ Leia’s face crumples for one moment, before she forces the emotion back into order. She’s so strong, and she’s been through so much hardship she didn’t deserve. Rey wants to help.

Rey places one hand over the General’s. ‘Would you… tell me about him?’ she asks shyly. ‘About your son?’

Leia blinks slowly, her eyes wet but bright with memory. ‘Ben. Every parent says this, but there wasn’t a more loved child in the universe. He was conceived on the night of the celebrations at Endor, after my father and my brother defeated Sheev Palpatine and restored order to the galaxy. Han and I were nervous, but we took that as a sign that this child would bring balance to the Force in a way Anakin never had. He would be a Skywalker and a Solo, after all.’

‘Luke picked his name. His namesake was Luke’s first master, Obi-Wan or ‘Old Ben’ Kenobi, an enigmatic but extremely good-natured man. We all hoped that Ben would be even more powerful than Ben, and in a way, he was. But not in the right way.’

‘When he was five or six, he started to have nightmares. So insidious and potent that I could feel them in the house, a dark presence constantly hanging over us. I had my suspicions, but I kept them to myself. If I’d only shared my fears with Han… I don’t know, I feel like something could have been done to stop what was happening. But then Ben started to show Force aptitude, and Luke wanted to train him. I thought that if he learned to harness the powers inside him, he could use them for good. But… the dark side – or Snoke, that sadist - influenced him, as it does almost all Jedi. I never dreamed he could kill anybody. But that doesn’t change the fact that he did, and I blame myself for sending him away.’

‘The Ben I remember loved nature. He used to sit outside on our balcony in Coruscant and play with his toys, surrounded by flowers. Butterflies would sometimes land on him and he’d cup his hands around them until they flew away. He used to beg Chewbacca to let him ride him like a horse, and he loved playing rebels and imperials with Han. When he had nightmares, I’d rock him to sleep. Whenever I baked anything, he’d come running to help – or just to lick the bowl. He drew pictures of fantasy beasts and pretended that he was a dragon-tamer. And he loved to explore…’ her voice cracks, and she stops, raising a wrinkled hand. There’s a long pause, then Leia shakes her head.

‘This feels like a eulogy,’ she sniffles, getting to her feet abruptly. ‘It’s been very cathartic to talk about all this, to let go of my son as I knew him. But all that’s left is the lie.’ She starts to walk away, shoulders hunched. Rey can’t just let her leave in misery.

‘It’s not a lie,’ she blurts out, and Leia stops.

‘There is still light in him, Leia. I’ve seen it. When I saved his life on Felucia, I created some kind of link between us. I’ve been able to hear his thoughts, see inside his mind, even when I didn’t want to.’

Leia walks back to the seat, sinking into the hard plastic. ‘Tell me _everything_ ,’ she whispered.

Rey frowns for a moment, thinking hard. ‘It will be easier if I show you. I may be able to – let me try this-‘

She presses the tips of her fingers against the General’s forehead, the way Kylo Ren had done to be able to scour her mind on Starkiller Base. Except this time, she is giving memories, not taking them. She concentrates fiercely, focusing on projecting her version of events into Leia’s head through their physical contact.

She shows her everything: the healings she’d performed back at the Falcon and in the cave beneath the waterfall. The Force lightning she’d shot at the rollies. Ren’s double-crossing. Reading about Revan and Bastila and their Force bond in the library. The moment Ren had come back from the slaughter at Felucia and she’d screamed at him. Their kiss. The shared exploration of the Force bond. The brightness, the darkness, the buried light.

When she pulls her hand away from Leia’s face, the general’s eyes are sparkling, wet. She says nothing for a long time. Then-

‘Thank you. This brings me joy, if not hope. As to your Force powers and the Force bond, I don’t know anything. But Luke will. And he’s on his way to Lothal as we speak.’

‘Master Luke?’ Rey’s eyes light up, her hands clasped in excitement. Leia smiles fondly.

‘Yes. He was the one who gave us the coordinates to find and rescue you.’

Rey laughed ecstatically. ‘He got my message, then! I can’t wait to see him.’

‘You don’t have long to wait. We should be setting down on Lothal in another three hours. You seem much healthier – you can roam the freighter for the rest of the journey if you like.’

Rey nods, then a thought occurs to her. A very reckless thought. ‘Can you direct me to the brig? I’d – I’d like to visit Ben.’

The General raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t question her. ‘Out of the med bay, to the right, follow the series of blue doors and turn at the last one.’

‘Great.’ Rey swings her legs off the stretcher. ‘I’ll be back soon. Just some unfinished business.’

\-- 

Kylo opens his eyes to the striated metal ceiling of a freighter, the silver piping of heat ducts worming above his head. Woozy, he tries to raise a hand, but thick leather straps have been placed around his arms, legs and torso, binding him to the stretcher. He can feel the itch of healing skin on his back and legs, and knows that a medical droid must have attended to him at some stage, because when he flicks his eyes down he can see a bacta patch pressed against his shoulder, his black shirt pulled down on one side for easy access.

Groaning, he rests his head against the stretcher, reaching out to the web of the Force instinctively. Where is Rey? He had failed Snoke so badly; he hoped he had at least managed to stay with the girl. He concentrates, descending into meditation, and after a moment he feels her Force signature, that pearlescent, unblemished essence of her. He rubs up against it, opening their link, trying to discern what’s happening on her end. Conversations, mostly. About her. About his father. About _him_! Leia’s talking to Rey about his childhood on Coruscant, spilling all sorts of private details.

He opens his eyes, livid. He can still hear Leia talking, and he can’t stand it. To shut her out, he concentrates on reciting the code of the Sith under his breath, a mantra, a calming chant.

_‘… Through power, I gain victory…’_

 --

There’s a heady moment of deja-vu when she finds the brig and walks in to see Kylo Ren in full rope restraints. _So we’ve come full-circle, then._

He glowers at her from the stretcher, such a look of spite in his brown eyes – so much like Leia’s, she realizes now - that she takes a step backward. ‘I trust you enjoyed your gossip session with my mother. And yes,’ he adds at her expression of chagrin, ‘I heard everything.’

‘I was only comforting her,’ Rey snaps, not sure why she feels the need to defend herself. ‘Your mother has almost given up on you.’

‘You have no right to tell her _anything_ about me. The woman restrained and imprisoned me, ordered her lapdog to injure me. She’s not exactly the motherly type.’

‘And you’re the doting son, right?’ Rey leans over the stretcher, her hard stare boring holes in him. ‘What’s _wrong_ with you? She told me about you: you used to play with goddamn butterflies! How do you go from that to spreading death and chaos, instead of peace?’

Kylo jeers at her from the stretcher, his black curls spread around his head like the opposite of a halo. ‘Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. You’re trying to reclaim something you can never get back.’

‘You’re repulsive.’ Rey wrinkles her nose at his vulgarity.

‘But I’m right,’ he pushes. ‘The rebels don’t realize how redundant they are. There was _never_ going to be peace between the galaxies. Without the dark side, the light would be nothing. If the First Order didn’t step up, someone else would have.’

‘That doesn’t mean you had to join them,’ Rey throws back at him, crossing her arms. ‘You didn’t have to sign your life away to Snoke. You could have been a Jedi.’

‘No, Rey,’ Kylo replies, his gaze not wavering from her own. ‘I really couldn’t.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘We’ve already established that.’

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

And Rey stalks out of the brig, back to the relative comfort of Leia and Chewie, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the last Jedi, and the wisdom he’ll share.

 


	18. Prisoner

He knows they’re discussing him again, the scavenger and his mother. He hopes they’re enjoying their conversation at the expense of his privacy. But then again, he _is_ eavesdropping through the link he shares with Rey; so being offended by her spilling his secrets is a tad hypocritical when he can pick her brain for hidden treasures any day of the week.

He had been righteously angry when his mother had waxed lyrical about his childhood, glossing over the horrors and embellishing the good moments like a common minstrel. _Fuck_. He’s never played with butterflies in his life. She’s making him sound like a sentimental fool in front of Rey. He doesn’t know why that bothers him so much.

Now they are discussing him in a different way. Rey is babbling about some obscure characters she’d read about in the library on the _Dahlia_ , and how their stories might be relevant to their situation. Kylo rolls his eyes and tries to slip out of his bonds again, but it’s no use – they’re fastened so tightly they are on the brink of cutting off his circulation. _Thanks for the gangrene, Mom._

The conversation ends, and he feels the link warm as Rey heads back in his direction, stopping outside his door for a moment, as though shy about inviting herself back into his cell.

‘I know you’re there,’ he says exasperatedly. ‘Just come in.’

She steps through the doorframe. ‘The pilots say we’ll be landing on Lothal in twenty minutes. I just wanted to check on you, see how you’re feeling.’

‘How I’m _feeling_?’ Ren repeats disbelievingly. ‘I’m feeling – hmm, let’s see – betrayed, furious, murderous, and pissed upon from a great height, all rolled into one delightful little ball. I was half expecting to ride off into the Moraband sunset with you, and now I’m being flown to a planet full of people who would like nothing better than to see me drawn and quartered for my ‘ _cosmic crimes’_ ,’ he air-quotes as best he can with his hands tied to the stretcher.

‘I understand all except the last emotion. And why were you expecting to ride off into the sunset with me? I would never have willingly gone anywhere with you.’

‘You _had_ no force of will, you were knocked out,’ Ren smiles grimly. ‘The rest of the First Order will either have fled to Moraband or made camp on Felucia until they can begin colonization.’

‘Don’t remind me!’ Rey’s face creases in a hideous scowl. ‘I’d rather not remember that I’m Force-bonded with a homicidal maniac.’

‘Too bad, scavenger. _You_ healed _me_. You forced the connection between us, remember _that_? Whatever comes next is yours to deal with.’

‘You know, Kylo – sometimes you really remind me of Han Solo, and not in a good way,’ Rey huffs, and Ren’s face freezes in a sneer of fury. He’s in the process of thinking up a pithy retort when there’s a fizz of static from the intercom, and one of their pilots announces that they are descending into Lothal’s atmosphere now.

‘Fucking great,’ Kylo moans, flattening himself against the stretcher. ‘Here come the primitives and their pitchforks.’

Rey raises an eyebrow. ‘Rethinking your life choices?’

He doesn’t respond, his eyes closed as he lies absolutely still on the bed. Rey guesses it’s best to leave him to his own devices, so she moves to the large viewport embedded in the side of the brig, gazing out at the lush forests and mountainous terrain of their host planet. Somewhere among those spiny trees are the Nerfs she’d heard about but never seen, and somewhere on Lothal is Luke Skywalker. She’s beginning to pick up his signature in the Force – a vivid, electric blue that matches both his eyes and his lightsaber.

 _The lightsaber!_ Rey realizes with a thrill of dismay. It had been confiscated by the First Order, and had probably still been locked up somewhere on the _Dahlia_ when it had been bombarded by the Resistance. She’d lost Luke’s lightsaber, his priceless heirloom, possibly forever. Suddenly, there isn’t a person in the Outer Rim that she wants to see less.

Kylo Ren sniggers meanly, obviously reading her train of thought. She frowns at him, trying to erect a mental wall. It doesn’t hold. The Force-bond is progressing beyond a point that they can keep eachother out. She doesn’t know whether to be worried by that, or excited. She decides she’ll hold off on judgement until she’s spoken to Luke about it. But that doesn’t mean she’s any less nervous to see him now. Her intestines tie themselves into Gordian knots.

‘Have you thought about testing it? The bond?’ Kylo enquires.

‘Not as much as Snoke did, I’m sure,’ Rey fires back, thoughts of the Supreme Leader only heightening her anxiety.

‘Believe me, if he’d _really_ been curious he would have done far worse than invade your head. There would have been experiments: like torturing one of us to see if the other felt it, or forcing one of us to project certain emotions or feelings onto the other.’

‘How can you be loyal to a beast like that?’ Rey says disgustedly. ‘I don’t-‘

‘Understand me, yeah, I got it the first two times,’ Ren finishes her sentence. ‘I don’t have the time or the patience to explain the complexities behind master and apprentice bonds right now.’

‘Well, I don’t imagine you’ll be free to roam the station,’ Rey says cheerily. ‘So if you find you have free time later, explain it to me then.’

He growls, and the freighter jolts sickeningly as they touch down on Lothalian soil. Despite his best attempts, Rey can feel the fear Kylo tries to bury beside every other emotion that isn’t hate or spite.

_Let it go, Ren._

_Get lost, scavenger._

She retreats to the helm of the freighter again, assembling with BB-8 and Leia. Chewie has been sent to restrain Ren, as he is physically stronger and more imposing. There are sounds of a scuffle from the brig, and eventually Chewie emerges, carrying Kylo Ren in his furry arms like a big, black-swaddled baby, bound with crude ropes. Rey shrieks with mirth.

Chewie deposits Ren at the helm, slowly unpicking the knots in his restraints. Leia addresses her son firmly: ‘Ben, I advise you to behave like a prisoner and not a renegade today. There will probably be snipers trained on you the second we leave the freighter, just looking for an excuse to fire. You already have enough injuries.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ Ren spits at his mother, his face twisted with loathing; whether directed at himself or at Leia or both, it’s impossible to say.

‘Trying to abscond with a valued member of the Resistance was grounds to attack,’ Leia says calmly.

‘Whatever.’ Ren shakes his arms out as the last of his bindings are loosened. ‘Who has my saber?’

Leia pats her side. ‘For obvious reasons, we won’t be handing it over today. You have to earn it back, Ben.’

The Force bond blazes claret with his rage, but he chooses not to reply. _Getting smarter by degrees,_ Rey shoots at him. _See what wonders time apart from Snoke can do for you._

They descend the ramp, leaving the stuffy air of the freighter for the warm breeze of the planet, walking along a starship landing strip towards a squat, white building shaped like a giftbox.

‘Where are we?’ she wonders aloud.

Leia glances back over her shoulder. ‘This is the Old Republic Senate building. It housed the governors of Lothal until it became the fortress for a rebel militia called the Spectres. It’s had some refurbishments since, obviously.’

As she talks, a band of people in Resistance uniforms stream out the door of the complex, gathering at the sidelines as they walk past. Rey stares around at their welcoming party: at least six air-force pilots all in full flight suits, a couple of medical droids, Threepio and Artoo, and the distinctive-faced Admiral Ackbar. It would have been a comforting sight, if they hadn’t all been holding blasters.

Kylo Ren steps down the freighter ramp with Chewbacca, aloof and self-possessed, nose practically in the clouds. He’s not bound, but there is a definite sense of being tethered as Chewie leads him into the senate. Rey follows them dutifully, letting the glass doors slide closed behind her and seal themselves, ostensibly trapping them in the building.

Once indoors, another set of rebel staff join them. Leia clears her throat to be heard over the mob. ‘We have taken Kylo Ren, First Knight of Ren as a prisoner of war. Please put him in Dorm Seven, and appoint two among you to guard the door. Treat him gently, but he is not to be trusted.’

Two of the rebels step forward and lightly take Kylo’s arms. He allows himself to be led off down a wing to their right. Rey follows his retreating back; experiencing his feelings of frustration and trepidation through their link, his fear prickling over her skin. _Calm down. Don’t do anything you’d normally do._

She can’t tell whether he’s received the advice, so she busies herself inspecting the military base. From the fire-exit map on the wall, she can discern that there’s a hangar for starships, a command deck and a medical bay, as well as living spaces for the troops.

‘This place must have a lot of history, if it was used when the Galactic Empire was overthrown.’

‘They were never really overthrown. Just dethroned,’ a deep, familiar voice says behind her, and she whips round and almost trips over her feet.

‘Luke!’

‘Careful!’ he exclaims, catching her flailing arm. ‘Have you been keeping up with your precision training?’

‘No, can’t you tell?’ Rey quips, but she bows her head. ‘I’m sorry, Master. I’ve been preoccupied.’

‘To a true Jedi, training and the duty of higher demand must always come first,’ Luke scolds, but his eyes are sparkling with good humour. ‘But then, you have had a lot on your hands, Padawan. And accomplished a lot. A Force-sending, if insubstantial, is quite the feat for a Jedi barely trained in Force manipulation.’

‘I got in a lot of trouble for that,’ Rey admits, then suddenly freezes as she remembers. ‘The Supreme Leader said that if I tried to communicate with anyone besides him or Kylo Ren again, he’d reach out across the universe and break my brain.’

Luke chuckles. ‘Darth Vitiate he is not. Snoke was trying to intimidate you. He is old and weak. He may have been able to transmit sendings to Kylo Ren to seduce him to the darkness, but that was over two decades ago, and they were words, not actions.’

Rey repeats the name. ‘ _Darth Vitiate_ … I need to learn more about all of these Sith Lords and Jedi Knights. But Luke… do you know anything about a Darth Revan? Or a Jedi Knight named Bastila?’

Luke does a comical double take. ‘Revan and Bastila? Nobody’s mentioned those names to me since I was training under Yoda.’

‘So you do remember them? Can you tell me anything? I know they had a powerful Force bond and were on opposite sides of the Force for a while, and that’s about it.’

‘I promise to tell you everything I know about Revan and Bastila, Rey. But right now we need to meet with my sister to decide what to do with Kylo Ren, now that we finally have him. The plan to bring him home has been long in the works, and I don’t think Leia ever expected it to come to fruition. Now that she has him, she doesn’t quite know what to do with him. Neither do I, for that matter.’

‘Couldn’t we retrain him like the Jedi Council did to Revan? I read about it in the Sith chronicles,’ Rey spouts off, trying to sound knowledgeable. Luke always brought out the teacher’s pet in her.

Luke shakes his head; his grizzled grey locks falling over one eye. ‘If we did that, we would be no better than Sheev Palpatine and his cronies, although he wasn’t in the Jedi council at the time of Revan’s reprogramming. We cannot deny any person agency, no matter how corrupt they are. And besides,’ Luke smiles mischievously, ‘to be Force-bonded to a young, powerful light-side Force user is punishment enough for Kylo Ren, I’m sure. Coming?’

Rey starts to follow Luke down the spacious wing to their left, but then remembers the lightsaber. ‘Master, I forgot to tell you – I’m ever so sorry, but I lost-‘

‘The blue lightsaber,’ Luke interrupts. ‘I know. It’s unfortunate, but probably for the best; you were outgrowing it anyway. There are certain caves on Lothal where you can harvest kyber crystals and make your own lightsaber – when you are ready, you will do so. Now come along. We’ll talk with Leia, and then I might pay a visit to Kylo Ren.’

_That’ll go down like a duranium balloon._

_No kidding_. Ren is listening in on her conversations again. Infuriating. She’s half tempted to take a leaf out of his book and throw a tantrum.

_Get out of my head._

_Make me._

_Soon,_ she promises him, stalking after Master Luke.

 


	19. Mayday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning for this chapter: Kylo's fantasy is pretty graphic (the boy is seriously fucked up).

He’s one step closer to the edge of insanity with every minute that passes by. The room is fine: furnished with bright wall hangings in cool tones of aquamarine and silver, a comfortable couch and a holovid for entertainment. It makes his living space on the _Black_ _Dahlia_ look like a prison. But _this_ is the real prison, complete with armed guards outside the door.

He could defeat two guards with the bat of an eyelash, saber or no saber. But he knows that if he does dispatch them, more will be sent and he’ll be overrun within minutes. There’s no point to the exercise, even if it would show his mother what he’s capable of. Demonstrating his power is always a titillating thought.

Kylo had never considered himself to be claustrophobic, but he’s slowly going mad here. A part of him wonders if he’d gotten too used to sharing a space with somebody: Rey has inhabited his private quarters, not to mention his head, for the past week, and he finds that he misses the intrusion. Hopefully she doesn’t pick up on that.

They’re busy with negotiations on what to do with him, he knows from prying into their still-strengthening connection. Skywalker is suggesting they keep him here until his master has given up on getting him back – the idea is laughable. They don’t know Snoke like he does; he’s old as time and stubborn as a pack of tauntauns. Years pass like grains of sand in an hourglass for him, and he is patient, despite his claims to the contrary. He’ll wait. Or start another war.

Leia is advocating for some sort of crude intervention, to remind him that he has family who love him no matter his actions, and that familial love alone will somehow convince him to convert to the Light. He actually does laugh at that idea, the harsh sound reverberating off the walls of his room. He’s spent too long in the shadows to ever walk the path of the Light again, at least not fully. Darkness is where he survives, and _thrives_.

Rey is listening rather than contributing to the conversation, but Ren can tell she has her own private thoughts about what to do. At least half of them involve forcibly mind-wiping him. How barbaric. And unoriginal, if the tenor of her thoughts is anything to go by: it’s been done before, to some poor soul called Revan, so that he could be reprogrammed-

 _Revan_. He’s heard that name before. But where?

He withdraws from the link as much as he can to rummage through his own mind, searching particularly hard through memories from the past week. And there it is: the conversation he’d had with Supreme Leader about Rey’s Force lightning manifestation, and others who had possessed that power. Revan had. But Snoke had said that Revan had been a Light side warrior. Yet Rey refers to him as Darth Revan in her thoughts.

_Interesting._

All this talk of enticing him back to the Light, and nobody has mentioned the very likely possibility that he could tempt Rey to the Darkness. It was what Snoke had charged him with, after all. He’d seen the darkness in her on Starkiller, when she’d fought so violently against the onslaught of his saber strikes. He’d seen it in her eyes the night he’d kissed her. Just as she’d seen the tiny spark of light in him, he’d glimpsed the coalescing darkness in her. Both are capable of being turned, and she _is_ drawn to him, even if she would only act on that in her dreams.

He recalls the erotic dream she’d projected into his mind, the morning of the slaughter on Felucia: the vivid imaginings of his hands on her, the slightest sensations of touch she’d sent over the link, the overwhelming tidal waves of her climax, the clichéd things she’d imagined him saying.

_You’ve been waiting for this your whole life._

_Yes._

_I can take whatever I want._

_Take everything._

He remembers how badly he’d wanted to touch himself as she imagined him taking her so roughly, how he’d been two seconds away from losing control in front of the Knights of Ren. He’s getting hard now, thinking about the whole ordeal, and he decides that if he’s _really_ going to be trapped in this room alone for the next few days, he might as well have some fun.

After all, she’d shared her explicit dreams with him, even if she hadn’t known she was doing it. Time to see if two could play at that game.

He re-enters the link, breathing deeply to calm and center himself. And then he begins to feed images to Rey as they occur to him, spinning his own private daydream for her to see. There’s no shutting out the visions, not with the bond this strong.

_‘I knew you’d make the right decision,’ he purrs in her ear, brushing one of her walnut curls away from her face. She wears her hair loose now, instead of in those childish buns, and her eyes are black and blown wide with lust as she gazes up at him._

_‘It was the_ only _decision,’ she corrects him, unsheathing her red saber-staff and twirling it expertly in one hand. ‘I would rather burn with you in hell than join the Jedi filth in heaven.’_

_Ren tugs on her arm, pulling her against him. ‘That’s my girl.’_

_‘We’ve got a battle to fight, Kylo. Leave the flirtation for the bedroom.’_

_‘You’re so right.’_

_And together they turn on Finn, Poe, Leia, Chewbacca – anybody who’s ever hurt Ren automatically receives a death sentence. Ren holds the Wookie’s arms behind his back with the Force while Rey flays him alive with a knife. In turn, Rey holds Finn in place while Kylo burns twin holes through his eye sockets with his lightsaber. Together they castrate Poe Dameron without mercy, and feed his own genitals to him, before turning on Leia and slicing her throat wide open with Rey’s flaying knife._

_They carry the skin of the Wookie back to Rey’s bedroom, and fuck on it like wild animals, the remaining blood on the rug smearing over Rey’s bottom and legs. He licks it off, and then turns his attentions to her dripping wet pussy –_

The door bursts open and Rey runs into his room. For a moment, so busy weaving the lewd details of the daydream; Ren doesn’t realize that she is real.

She quickly becomes _too_ real when she marches over to the couch and kicks him, hard, in the groin. He could have sworn he hears something burst.

‘ _Fuck_!’ he wheezes, clutching himself and toppling right off the couch. Spasms are running from his nuts to his stomach and he doubles over, on the verge of throwing up from the pain.

Rey stares at him, crazy-eyed, almost hyperventilating. ‘That’s where sick, depraved fantasies about me will get you.’

He rolls over on the floor. ‘It was just… a joke.’

Rey’s eyes grow even wider, if possible. ‘That’s your idea of a _joke_?’ she yells, and throws herself at him, punching and kicking at every undefended part of him.

‘ _Ow_ – holy shit – _get off_!’ She’s flailing her arms in every direction, striking his cheek, arm and chest in quick succession, the last shot between the ribs winding him temporarily.

Ren surges up underneath her and restrains her arms with both hands, flipping her over easily so that he’s lying on top of her.

Rey glares up at him maliciously, struggling valiantly against his hands. ‘You’re a total degenerate.’

‘Definitely,’ he agrees, not letting her up. It’s different and unusual, seeing her pinned underneath him like this, her legs spread out and kicking the floor. It’s also a turn-on, but his groin is throbbing with pain and nothing is responding down there. He uses the Force to dispel some of the agony, taking the edge off.

Rey knows what he’s thinking, of course. ‘Are you serious?’ She cranes her neck, peering downward. ‘Are you actually asking for another kick? Because it looks that way.’

‘No.’ He rests on his forearms, his face centimetres away from hers.

‘Then what the bloody hell are you doing?’

Ren thinks for a moment, his eyes dark and impish. ‘Experimenting,’ he says at last.

‘With what? Projecting your twisted fantasies into my mind and disturbing me in the middle of a conference? Congratulations, you succeeded.’

‘Ugh.’ He pushes himself off her, rapidly losing interest. ‘Such hypocrisy.’

‘What?’ she snarls, straightening her top and glaring at him.

Why is it okay for her to disrupt him with her explicit fantasies, but not the other way round? ‘Just forget it.’

‘Gladly,’ she says acidly. And just then, the door opened. None other than Luke Skywalker, his former master, is standing there in weathered, frayed Jedi robes, a thick book clutched in one hand. Threepio hovers behind him, looking as grave as an android possibly could.

Ren bristles. ‘You might want to practice knocking next time, _Jedi_. I am not eight years old anymore.’

‘You certainly aren’t. You just got more bratty instead of less,’ Luke fires back, stepping through the door and dumping the book on the coffee table. ‘Nice to see you.’

‘Oh, likewise, I’m sure.’ Ren stretches himself up to his full height: at well over six feet he towers over the short Jedi, who just gazes up at him serenely, entirely unbothered.

‘You can stop posturing now, Ben. I’ve been researching Revan and Bastila as promised, Rey, along with trying to recall the details of what I learned so long ago under Yoda. I commissioned C3PO and Artoo to search the archives for relevant information and copy it.’

‘Okay…’ Rey brushes herself off and perched on the arm of the couch, as far away from Kylo as possible. He stays where he is, in the centre of the room, arms folded, adopting an air of only half-concentration.

‘Ben, this concerns you too.’

‘Do I look concerned to you?’ But Kylo moves to sit on the opposite arm of the couch, easing himself gingerly onto it, his nuts still tender.

 _I notice you don’t threaten to kill_ him _when he calls you Ben_ , Rey projects into his mind, her tone sullen. _Who’s the hypocrite now?_

‘So, when I was training on Dagobah, I journeyed to a Dark place in the Force, deep in the swamps. There, I learned all I could about the Sith, the Empire and other evils of eternities past. Yoda believed that a true Jedi should study both the light and the darkness in the Force, and this is where I first learned about Darth Revan. My initial knowledge was that he grew up on a desert planet, much like you or I, Rey. He signed up to train under the Jedi of old, but was swayed by the influence of the Sith and left with a friend, who later became Darth Malak, to the Unknown Regions. He turned to the Dark Side and was appointed Darth Revan. He was one of the most powerful Jedi and Sith in history, and was able to connect with and use both sides of the Force at once in battle. He was _balance_ , in a way that my father was not. And I suspect that, had he been alive at the time of Snoke’s rule, the First Order would have taken great interest in him. He was sculpted from both darkness and light, a rare thing that I have only seen once before in my time as a Jedi master.’ He turns around to meet Ren’s carefully disinterested stare, and motioned to C3PO to pick up where he’d left off.

‘Bastila was completely ignored in these teachings – that’s where this book comes in handy.’ C3PO picks up the heavy book on the coffee table. ‘It is a chronicle of every Jedi Knight that served the council during the time of the Galactic Republic and the Mandalorian Wars. Bastila was by no means a background character in the Galactic Wars – she was an intensely powerful Jedi. She was born on Talravin and given to the Jedi Order at a very young age, due to her exceptional Force gifts. According to the book and the records I searched, she was very skilled at battle meditation, a Force power that increased the spirit, strength and morale of people she fought with. She was actually head of the Jedi strike-team sent to take down Darth Revan and Malak. She fought Revan, then healed him just as he was about to die, having been double-crossed by Darth Malak. The healing created a powerful Force-bond between them, among the first between Jedi and Sith.’

‘Now here’s where it gets interesting,’ Luke interrupts excitedly. ‘I consulted the archives for a births, deaths and marriages database – yes, Rey, I know the Jedi were not meant to bear children,’ he adds as Rey opens her mouth to protest. ‘But Bastila did. She gave birth to a child, Vaner Shan, who was fathered by Revan shortly before his disappearance.’

‘Bastila and Revan were deeply in love, you see. There isn’t a record of for how long or whether the love was the result of the Force bond between them. All historians seem to know is that the bond was immensely powerful – it connected them across the galaxy, no matter how far from the Coruscant Core either one of them travelled. It is believed that Bastila fell to the Dark side at some stage of their relationship, and Revan sacrificed everything to bring her back to the Light, before returning to the darkness himself at a later date, abandoning Bastila and the baby. There are no further records of Bastila after the birth of her son, but Revan turns up again three hundred years later.’ Luke takes the book from C3PO and opens it to a marked page. ‘Here. _Driven mad by memories of his family and by the Force bond that still lingered after Bastila’s death, as well as the three hundred years of unrelenting torture at the hands of the Sith Emperor, Revan’s mind was splintered, and he embraced the Dark side fully, wandering the galaxy as a wrathful specter before finally merging with the Force and dying.’_

He raises his eyes from the page, and they are full of unease.

 

 

 


	20. Shades of Grey

‘Riveting stuff,’ Kylo Ren drones. ‘But what does this have to do with us?’

‘Rey has astutely picked up on certain similarities between Bastila and Revan, and herself and you.’ Luke sets the book down on the coffee table, open to a page showing an artwork of Darth Revan – masked, hooded and caped, like Ren.

‘Like what?’ Ren scoffs, his eyes flicking from the page back up to his uncle’s cool stare. ‘The fact that Revan wore a mask? A lot of Dark Siders do.’

‘No. The fact that Revan was the literal razor’s edge of both the darkness and the light, like you. The Force bond between you that strengthens day by day. Your particular powers and abilities with the Force.’

‘So what are you trying to suggest here? That we’re somehow descended from them, or reincarnations, or something?’ Kylo raises his palms in the air. ‘This is ludicrous.’

‘I don’t have any theories yet; although Vaner Shan did go on to sire two children, so it’s possible that the Shan bloodline is not extinct. The similarities are uncanny, but I believe that they are the result of the Force bond connecting you. And that’s the problem.’

Luke fixes them both with a piercing blue gaze. ‘If the bond continues to get stronger, as you have told me it has… it may drive you to madness.’

‘What?’ Rey bursts out. ‘Surely there’s some way to break it before it gets to that point?’

Threepio beeps and shakes his metal head. ‘I haven’t finished researching Force bonds themselves yet, mistress, but nothing I’ve found has suggested you can break a bond once it’s been forged. It is direct Force energy connecting two users’ brains. What I have gleaned is that when two people are bonded, they slowly begin to lose their individuality, sharing the same thoughts and emotions, bleeding into eachother’s consciousness. If one member of the bond is stronger, that person typically starts to dominate the Bond, leaving the other member susceptible to influence by the stronger’.

‘I think this is how Bastila Shan may have fallen to the Dark side. The switching of sides was common in Jedi and Sith bonds, what little of them there were. Phenomenon like this actually led to the creation of the Grey Jedi,’ Luke muses, fingers playing with his scruffy beard.

Finally, Kylo Ren’s interest is piqued. ‘ _Grey_ Jedi?’

Luke nods. ‘I know even less about Grey Jedi than I do about Bastila and Revan. But it was told to me long ago that there were certain Jedi who could walk the line between the light and the dark, neither good nor evil, living outside the code of the Jedi, but not committed to practicing the dark arts under the Sith. My master’s master, Qui-Gon Jinn, was rumoured to be one – and to be honest, for a while I wondered if maybe that was what you were destined to become, Ben. Your mother thought so too, if that helps.’

Kylo snarls under his breath. Rey can feel his torment through the link, his caged fury like sandpaper on her mind through their connection. It’s distracting, and she tries to conjure the ocean she’d often dreamed of to help her sleep at night: churning whorls of blue water under an expanse of stars. She feels Ren’s temper cool slightly, and realizes that she’s projecting; he can see the ocean too. Just like when he’d first read her mind.

‘I’m not going to listen to this crap anymore,’ Kylo mutters, getting up from the couch and stalking towards the enclosed bathroom at the back of the unit. ‘You made a Force bond with me; we can’t get rid of it, that’s the end of it. Revan, Grey Jedi and everything else? It’s all so much bullshit.’ He slams the door.

‘Okay, Kylo. Have fun sulking in the shower,’ Rey calls after him, then turns her attention to her master.

‘So… what does all this mean?’ she asks, unable to process the overload of information. ‘Grey Jedi, the Force bonds, my powers? People going insane, or being overtaken by eachother? You’ve told us facts, but I want _your_ theories, Master Luke.’

Luke sighs and scratches his head. ‘It’s easy for me to theorize, Rey, but I have no idea whether there’s any merit to my ideas. For instance, since we don’t know your heritage, it’s as likely as anything else that you are a descendant of Revan and Bastila. Their family tree was lost after the birth of Theron, who was about seven generations down the Shan line. Your powers echo Revan’s; in terms of the Force lightning, and the telekinesis you were developing under my teachings.’

‘What about the Force bond, though?’ she presses in an urgent whisper. ‘Do you think that if it keeps getting stronger, I could overshadow Kylo and influence him to come back to the Light?’

‘That has as much chance of happening as his overshadowing you and leading you into the Dark,’ Luke affirms. ‘You may end up able to share abilities, as well as your thoughts and feelings.’

‘And dreams,’ Rey murmurs, thinking about _those_ particularly unpleasant side effects.

‘Yes.’ Luke had no idea what he was agreeing with, fortunately.

Rey frowns, considering everything.

 --

Inside the cramped bathroom, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, Kylo Ren rests his chin on his hands, thinking too many troublesome things. Seeing his uncle after so many years has brought back repressed memories of being a Padawan, spinning weightless rocks in midair and joining hands to meditate with the other children. And all the while his mother and his master had been gossiping behind his back, saying he wasn’t fit to be a real Jedi, but a Grey one, or whatever they are. He’d proven them right – and wrong - by murdering the other Padawans and pledging his life to the Dark. And he’d never missed the proximity of the Dark side more in his life. If he’d had his lightsaber, he would have dueled Luke Skywalker right here, in this tiny cubicle. At least then, even after his mothers’ minions killed him, he would be redeemed.

Snoke was right: he _does_ have compassion for Rey, and he’s reluctant to hurt her. He’d let himself grow too attached, even without the pull of their bond, and it has made him weak. What the fuck is he doing, languishing in a Resistance stronghold instead of fighting tooth and nail to escape? He second-guesses so many of his decisions now, and that’s because of _her_.

He stands up and turns on the refresher in the corner of the bathroom, stripping off and standing under the hot spray of water, letting the steam distill his sins.

 --

Kylo emerges from the bathroom shortly after Luke departs with Threepio. Rey had been perusing the book Luke had left behind, but closes it with a snap when she notices Ren out of the corner of her eye. She whips round on the couch, expecting retaliation for her earlier kick. But he just smirks at her, turning his back on her and striding into the small kitchen area at the back of the unit. He’s shirtless, his lower half wrapped in a towel, and her eyes take in the broadness of his back and shoulders, the moles and freckles scattered like constellations over his pale skin. His black hair is dripping; rivulets of water snaking down his spine. She tries to rip her eyes away, but couldn’t.

‘You’re staring,’ he says conversationally as he opened the kitchen drawers, pulling out a bowl.

She scowls, teeth worrying at her bottom lip. ‘So? You always stare at me.’

He turns round, leaning against the kitchen counter and running a hand through his wet mane of hair. ‘And why do you think that is?’

Rey raises her eyebrows. ‘Because you’re a creep?’

‘No. It’s because you’re beautiful,’ he says simply, and turns away from her again, closing the drawer he’d left open.

‘ _What_?’

‘You heard me.’

‘Yeah, I heard what you said. I just can’t believe you went there.’

‘Really?’ he grins, abandoning the hunt for utensils and walking over to the couch. ‘You think I’m so blinded by the Dark that I can’t see a pretty girl in front of me? You’re beautiful. I’ve noticed. That’s why I stare. So what’s your excuse?’

‘Why are we talking about this _now_?’ Rey asks, perplexed.

‘Why not now? You’ve just spent the last hour talking to my uncle about Revan and Bastila and their love story.’

Rey lets out a bark of laughter, cottoning on. ‘We are _not_ a love story.’

‘Aren’t we?’ he squats down in front of her, dark eyes searching her face. All of the things that normally make her wary of him – the threatening stance, the clenched fists, the tortured expressions – all of them have fallen by the wayside, leaving her with a stripped-back version of Kylo Ren. She doesn’t know what to make of him.

‘Are you kidding? _No_!’

‘No?’ A smile plays at the corners of his lips. ‘Then why do you fantasize about fucking me?’

‘I _don’t_!’ Rey gasps, scandalized, shrinking back into the couch cushions.

‘Yes, you do,’ he replies, his voice low and tantalizing. ‘I’ve seen every fantasy you have, the same way you saw mine today. You imagine things you’d never dare to think about while you’re awake.’

He leans down, putting his hands on either side of her legs, bringing his face very close to hers. ‘I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want you, Rey. So why are you still pretending you don’t want me?’

She squeezes her eyes shut to avoid looking at him. The fact that he’s only wearing a towel is incredibly distracting, not to mention surreal. ‘I’m not pretending. I hate everything about you.’

‘Then what’s your explanation?’

‘It’s the Force-bond. It’s pulling us together. Making me dream things that I don’t want to. I _really_ don’t.’ She opens her eyes again, and her gaze is burning. ‘But they’re just dreams. They’re only real if I act on them. And I never will, because you’re a murderer and a traitor, and you disgust me.’

‘None of that seemed to bother you the day I got back from Felucia.’

‘That was the Force, too. We were testing the depth of the bond. It was _natural_ , for crying out loud!’

‘Go ahead and blame everything on the Force. I hope you’re convincing yourself more than you’re convincing me.’

‘I don’t have to try to _convince_ you,’ she grits out, hands curling into little fists on her legs. ‘All that matters is that nothing will happen. Not now, not ever. Okay?’

‘Nope, not okay,’ he replies, and he seizes her face and kissed her.

He cradles her head in his hands, and he strokes a thumb over the skin of her cheek, soft as a peach. His lips move against hers, and Rey can feel her body start to respond, an odd tingling in her fingertips and toes, her face flushing pink. She’s screaming internally, so conflicted by her emotions and the attraction she’s denied so fervently. How can something that she knows is so utterly wrong feel so perfect?

She wants to slap him away as she’d done the first time they’d kissed – she even raises her hand - but she can’t make herself do it. And so she tentatively kisses him back, losing her sense of self in the moment, trying to unlearn every sickening thing she knows about him as their lips brush together, passionate and gentle. There’s no black or white, no light and dark, no absolutes. Her thoughts swim with endless, shifting shades of grey.

Someone knocks on the door. She rips her mouth away from his, head turning toward the unwelcome sound.

‘Fucking hell, I hate this place,’ Kylo snarls, readjusting the towel and heading for the bathroom to retrieve his clothes. Once he’s inside, Rey opens the door. Leia and Luke are standing there, entirely unaware of what they’ve just interrupted.

‘Oh, Rey, hello!’ Leia exclaims, surprised. ‘We didn’t know you’d still be here. We need to take Ben to the conference room.’

‘I… think he’s in the bathroom,’ Rey says slowly, opening the door wider and letting the twins enter. ‘Shouldn’t be too long.’

‘All right,’ Leia says awkwardly, clearly unsure what to think about finding Rey in Kylo’s designated cell.

The man in question throws open the bathroom door with a bang and stalks out, clad all in black again, minus his traditional surcoat but armed with a glare that could melt flesh. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

Leia chooses to rise above the rudeness. ‘Our scanners have been gathering intelligence, and we’d like to discuss it with you. Will you come to the conference room with us?’

Ren sneers softly. ‘I thought I was a political prisoner, General. We don’t usually receive updates about our allies in the middle of the night.’

‘Ben,’ Leia says tiredly, ‘just come.’

She takes Luke’s arm and they start to walk out of the room. Rey waits for Kylo to move first, his fists clenching as he reluctantly trails after what’s left of his family.

_I hate everyone._

She isn’t sure whether that’s directed at her, but she replies anyway.

_I know._

 


	21. Expeditions

‘We’ve sent three probes with surveillance droids over Felucia, and two more over Moraband. And from what they’ve gathered, we suspect that the First Order is planning to convert Felucia into _another_ super-weapon,’ Leia summarizes, switching off the screen behind her and resting her palms on the tabletop. Rey, Kylo, Luke and General Ackbar are seated around the table, all paying close attention except for Kylo, who glares down at his hands, refusing to contribute to the conversation.

‘It doesn’t seem like their M.O to just make _another_ Starkiller, though,’ Luke considers, his brow furrowed. ‘The Dark side doesn’t have the best reputation for being able to keep Death Stars running, after all.’

‘Thanks to you,’ Rey quips, and Luke grins rambunctiously. Kylo rocks back on the legs of his chair, frustration evident in his every feature. _Are you fucking serious?_ he projects across the bond.

‘What?’ she says innocently. ‘There’s _obviously_ a fault in the Death Stars if we rebels keep getting in.’

‘I’m so fucking out of here,’ he growls, slamming the chair back onto four legs and starting to get up. ‘There’s no point in listening to this. And your theories are horseshit anyway. Snoke wouldn’t build a second super-weapon after the first failed. He _learns_ from his mistakes.’ He glowers at his mother, whose eyes have brightened at the slip of information. ‘And no, I’m not going to share his plans with you – even if I knew what they were, which I unequivocally don’t.’

Leia holds up a hand to stop him, and turns her attention to Luke and Ackbar. ‘Leave us for a moment?’

The two of them stand up and leave the room. Leia turns back to fix her son with a disappointed, disheartened gaze.

‘I’m not expecting you to give us any private information about your _Master_ , Ben,’ she says sarcastically. ‘But I _do_ need to know exactly what happened on Felucia. We know the First Order were responsible for the massacre, but why? What do they want the use of the planet for? And what about you? What was your role in all this?’

‘What do you think will change if I tell you?’ Kylo snarls, prickling with hostility. ‘You already think you know everything: I’m the _Jedi Killer_ , remember? I’m a mass-murderering traitor and a prisoner of the Resistance. And apparently we’re building a second super-weapon.’

‘Ben,’ Leia growls from between clenched teeth. ‘Tell me what really happened, so I can have some small _chance_ of forgiving you.’

‘I don’t want your forgiveness,’ he spits, turning his back on her and stalking towards the door. He stopped with his hand on the knob. ‘But if it’ll make you happy, I didn’t arrive til the end of the slaughter. I killed two people. That’s the number. _Two_.’ He swings the door open and stamps out, almost barging into Luke, who’s waiting outside to escort him back to his dormitory.

Leia groans and sinks back into her seat, kneading her forehead in exasperation. Rey observes her quietly, a million different thoughts and questions competing for attention, Kylo’s angry inner monologue echoing inside her head as well.

_Nothing ever changes; it was fruitless to think she would be any different, any more of a mother between then and now…_

That sparks her curiosity, but she lets his voice peter out as she vaguely registers that the General had asked her something.

‘I’m sorry, what was that?’

‘I asked if Luke had mentioned anything more about your lightsaber, Rey. He said that you had lost yours when the starship was attacked. You will need to make a new one. There is a network of underwater caves on the coast of Lothal, near the ruins of the Jedi temple, where you can find kyber crystals. It’s about five hours west of here on foot. You need to make a new lightsaber, Rey – the First Order is mobilizing, even if we don’t know what they’re up to, and you, as a Force-sensitive, need to protect yourself.’

‘General?’ Rey asks timidly. ‘You’re Force-sensitive too, aren’t you? So… why don’t _you_ have a lightsaber?’

‘I was never trained in the ways of the Jedi, or the Force,’ Leia admits. ‘Sometimes I wish I had been – I would have loved to learn how to use a lightsaber or do the mind tricks Ben Kenobi was so famous for. But my upbringing, and my choices, took me down a different path. More military-oriented, but no less important.’

Rey nods her understanding as Leia scrutinizes her with kind, but essentially curious eyes.

‘The affection Ben has for you – I can feel it,’ she says candidly. ‘He has so much hate in him, so much anger – but it dissipates some, when you’re nearby.’

Rey cringes a little. ‘Really? I’m not sure how to feel about that.’ _The man holds a saber to my neck, drags me around by my hair and hits me over the head with a saber-hilt, and that’s affectionate?_

‘It’s a good thing,’ Leia muses. ‘It’s a pleasant change, anyway. Now, about the crystal caves: Luke has given me a map with directions plotted, and there are a few different jumpspeeders you can use to shorten the journey. The only thing is: you’ll need a guide. Not so much for safety as for instruction, and Luke must stay with me, to help me plan our next airstrike. Only powerfully Force-sensitive individuals can find the crystal caves, since they are submerged.’

‘And if Luke can’t go, that means… Ren,’ Rey deduces, skipping straight to the crux of the matter.

‘Ben knows how to construct a lightsaber. He can show you.’

Rey shakes her head. ‘He already offered to be my teacher once. You can imagine how that went down.’

‘ _If_ we send him with you, he will not have access to a lightsaber or any weapon, and the speeder will be configured to only respond to your fingerprints. They’re pretty high-tech nowadays, not like the old 74-Z I used to ride.’

Rey gives Leia a piercing look. ‘General – it feels like you’re trying to force him into spending time with me.’

Leia smiles. ‘Perhaps I am, in a roundabout way. Call it a mother’s instinct, but… when you are with him, I sense the light becoming stronger. Just like you showed me back on the freighter.’

 _That’s a bit of a stretch,_ Rey thinks to herself. But she knows innately that Kylo Ren is struggling with being confined, and part of her, stupid as it was, wants to help him, even grows excited at the idea of another cross-country adventure like the one they’d had on Felucia.

‘Okay.’

Leia’s face lights up. ‘This will be good for him, Rey.’

 _Lady, I think you have a little thing called too much faith._ But she forces a smile and stands up, and Leia gives her a small hug in gratitude.

 --

‘This is fucking ridiculous,’ Kylo swears, pacing round the room in agitation. He points an accusing finger at his uncle. ‘Why would you send _me_ with your precious Padawan on a mission to complete her training? Aren’t you afraid that I might, you know, _kill her_?’

Luke smiles grimly. ‘We both know she’d kick your ass.’

‘You’re only doing this to torment me. This whole orchestration is a lie – you’re taunting me with information on my allies, and now forcing me to accompany my enemy to a crystal cave so she can make a new lightsaber to replace the one she almost killed me with? What’s your endgame, Skywalker?’

‘ _My_ endgame?’ Luke repeats, stepping closer until he’s glaring up at the taller man. ‘To help you. Just like Leia and Han asked me to do when they sent you to my Jedi academy. Leia thinks there’s still good in you, so you are going to accompany my Padawan or so help me, Ben Solo, I will tell Rey the truth about you.’

Kylo stiffens, his eyes dimming with uncertainty. ‘You wouldn’t.’

‘Try me. As of now, she still has no idea – the memory wipe still holds. But that can all change.’

‘I hate you,’ Kylo whispers, anxiety and fury roiling inside him, blurring his uncle’s reply.

‘Nothing has changed, then,’ Luke fires back as he turns to leave the room.

 --

‘So we’ve programmed a high-profile fingerprint scanner on this bike – if you’d like to put your index finger here…’

Rey presses her finger to a screen under the bike’s handlebars, and it beeps a confirmation.

‘There we are. From now on, it will only respond to you once you’ve unlocked it. It auto-locks every four minutes, so if someone else tries to commandeer it, they won’t get far.’ The technician glances toward Kylo Ren, who is standing close behind Rey with a tremendous scowl and tightly crossed arms.

‘Great. Any other tech-specs I should be aware of before I take it out?’ Rey asks, running her hands over the smooth metal surface of the speeder. Shiny, streamlined and chrome, it’s much classier than the rusted tin speeder she’d ridden over sand dunes on Jakku, trawling through the wreckage of starships.

‘Nope. Just make sure you wear a helmet and goggles.’

‘No kidding,’ Rey rolls her eyes, thinking of her gauze headgear and goggles on Jakku – nothing so drastic will be needed here, but there’s a rack of helmets on the wall of the garage, and she takes a red one from the shelf, jamming it over her head and pulling the visor down. Kylo does the same with a black helmet, his dark curls sticking out underneath.

‘Right. I’m good from here on out,’ Rey says, swinging a leg up over the bike. ‘Ren, get behind me. You can hug me if you’re scared,’ she grins, looking back over her shoulder as Kylo climbs up behind her. He shoots her an unreadable look from under the tinted visor.

A mechanic pushes up the roller-door of the garage, and the panorama of Lothal’s cityscape is suddenly visible. Rey turns back to Kylo and hands him the map Leia had given her.

‘I’m going to need you to navigate if I’m driving. We’re heading out of the city, through the forest, across a prairie and onto a beach. Cool?’

He snatches the map from her without a word, spreading it out against her back as she guns the engine. The speeder jumps forward efficiently, the map flapping in the sudden slipstream as they zoom out of the hangar and into the city streets. Rey kept her eyes in front of her as they speed through the ghost town, past empty, bleached houses and domed towers. A metropolis of bones.

Kylo squints at the map, the dotted line his mother had drawn leading through the labyrinth of Lothal’s laneways and out into the woods. ‘Take the next left.’

Rey expertly turns the bike and they roar up a side road, across cracked pavement and past walls sprayed with anti-Imperial graffiti. She turns another corner and the forest spreads out before them: deep green in some parts, blackened and burned in others. She aims the bike between two trees and then they’re racing through the undergrowth, avoiding trunks and snarls of roots, at one point passing directly under the extended limb of a spine tree, causing Kylo to yell out and duck as the branch scrapes his helmet.

‘Be careful!’

‘Get better reflexes!’ Rey jibes back, but she slows the bike from its breakneck speed.

‘Why aren’t you wearing your other helmet, anyway?’ she asks, tossing a glance at the black regulation helmet he wore.

‘I assume General Organa is holding it with her other spoils of war,’ Kylo says bitterly.

‘This one suits you much better,’ Rey says in an offhand tone, turning back to the front of the bike. Kylo glares at her back, then pulls the map out again, following the drawn lines in silence.

Rey guns the bike again as the trees thin in front of them, fallen leaves giving way to grass as they zoom onto a prairie dotted with purple wildflowers. She guides the bike over the uneven terrain, and then cries out, pointing ahead at a shaggy, cow-like creature with a forked tail and curving horns, eating grass on a faraway knoll.

‘A Nerf!’ she exclaims.

‘What’s so exciting about a damn Nerf?’ Kylo gripes.

‘I’ve never seen one before! They’re so cute!’

Kylo sighs, pushing his helmet further down as the wind chaps his skin. They ride over the savannah for another half an hour, spotting several more grazing Nerfs, and then Rey slows the bike again, the coastline appearing in the distance.

 


	22. Crystal Caves

They drive closer, the prairie dropping away into a series of cliffs and canyons, the crashing melody of the ocean carried on the breeze. Rey slows the bike to a stop and locks the system with a touch of her fingerprint, dismounting smoothly. Kylo clambers off the bike, ungainly and awkward, and Rey smiles.

They hike down a set of steps cut into the cliff, and walk onto sand dunes that are soft and golden, so different from the coarse brown sand back on Jakku. The waves break into a froth of foam and lap against the shoreline, instantly calming Rey as she looks out at the place they need to go: a small cave entrance at the foot of the next cliff. Leia had said it was partly submerged: they’ll need to swim.

‘Oh, hell no.’ Kylo says, reading her thoughts.

Rey grins at him. ‘Can’t you swim?’

‘Can _you_ , desert rat?’ he snipes back immediately.

‘As a matter of fact, I can. I learned while studying with Master Luke.’

‘So did I,’ Kylo grits his teeth. ‘It would have been _nice_ if someone had warned me – I didn’t bring a change of clothes.’

‘Neither did I,’ Rey says cheerfully. They walk over to the cave, a jagged, washed-out hole in the cliff, slick with urchins and jutting black rocks. Rey picks her way across the slippery parts, Kylo following her. And as the beach gradually disappears from sight, Rey felt her sensitivity to the Force increase, a soft light starting to glow inside her mind. They walk deeper into the cave, the rocks glistening wetly underfoot, and Rey throws out an arm to stop Kylo from stepping into a deep, water-filled puddle.

She crouches down and sticks her arm into the hole, testing for depth. The water creeps up to her shoulder and further. ‘Weird.’

Rey takes a deep breath and plunges her head under the water, opening her eyes once she’s submerged. The water is black and freezing, but when she turns her head to the left, bubbles streaming from her lips, she can see a glowing light through the murk. She comes up for air, breathing heavily, strands of hair plastered to her forehead.

‘There’s something down there.’

Kylo groans. ‘Why can’t we just keep going straight ahead?’

They both look at the black void beyond their vision, and Rey steps across the hole in the rock floor, running her hands over the walls in the darkness. It’s hard to see, but she can vaguely make out the rock projections – and then her hands hit a solid wall. She traces it, trying to find an opening, but there’s nothing except a sheet of wet stone. ‘The tunnel ends here.’

‘Of course it does.’ She hears a long-suffering sigh, and then a splash – Kylo must have jumped into the hole. She makes her way back to the pool, kneeling beside it as the ripples from Kylo’s entry begin to disperse.

She feels blindly around the edge of the rockpool, her fingers brushing over Ren’s black surcoat – he must have taken it off before he’d dived. She plays with the fabric absently as the surface of the pool becomes glassy and still as a mirror, reflecting nothing in the darkness as Rey grows increasingly more fidgety and worried.

Time slows to a crawl. _Has he drowned? What the heck do I tell Leia?_

But then, with a gasp and a shower of water droplets, Kylo’s head breaks the surface. ‘There’s a second tunnel,’ he pants, bracing himself against the edge of the rockpool. ‘And it’s full of crystals.’

He dives under again, and Rey waits a few seconds before she follows. The water freezes her arms and chest, raising goosepimples as she strokes down towards the dim glow at the corner of her vision. She feels around the sides of the rockpool until her icy fingers meet a gap in the rock, and she swims through, up towards a much brighter light, shimmering on the surface of the water.

She swims into the shallows and scrambles for purchase on the slippery rocks at the side of the pool. Dragging herself up onto the ledge, she raises her head to watch Kylo Ren, his soaked clothes sticking to him like a second skin as he inspects a giant chunk of purple crystal protruding from the rock-wall.

‘That was not fun,’ she comments, blowing on her cold hands.

‘Neither was the last cave,’ Kylo replies idly, fingers tracing the sharp facets of the crystal.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Rey smiles wryly. She looks down at her hands, reddened with the cold, and giggles, remembering. ‘I still can’t believe you broke your hand punching a panther in the face.’

‘I can’t believe you were stupid enough to take a leap of faith over a _waterfall_ ,’ Kylo shoots back, coming over to where she sits.

‘Hey, you did it too!’ she protests, rubbing her hands together and shivering.

‘Here.’ Kylo holds out his hand to help her up. She eyes it warily - half wondering if he’s going to yank it out of her grasp halfway, so she’ll fall back into the rockpool - but she takes it, and he pulls her to her feet.

‘Very gallant of you,’ she notes, and he rewards her with his trademark sneer.

They walk through the new tunnel, Rey pausing every few seconds to stare at the chunky veins of crystal that score the rock walls, glittering brightly in the gloomy cave. There are tiny crystals and enormous ones, in soft pastel shades of yellow, primrose, lilac and sky blue. At one particular patch of dark pink crystals, she closes her eyes and listens intently: they’re calling to her, _singing_ , a sweet, wordless song resonating inside the core of her being. She wonders if Kylo can hear it.

 _Yes_ , his answer flows suddenly into her mind. _I hear it, through you. This is the crystal you need to use for your lightsaber._

Rey nods, eyes still closed, and stretches out her arm, her fingers circling in the air before landing on a shard of the crystal, which breaks off easily and falls into her other palm. The vocalizing grows stronger, and Rey cups her hands around the tiny shard, breathing meditatively.

Light explodes in her mind, rainbows arcing under her eyelids, her hair standing on end as she moved _inside_ the Force for the first time: the points of light she’d always seen expanding; that cosmic grid behind her eyes morphing into thousands of unnamed colours and shapes that whirl through her consciousness, dizzying, stupefying. The kyber crystal warms steadily in her hands, flaring to hot as Rey wrenches her eyes open, stunned by the enormity of it all.

‘The Force-‘ she chokes out. ‘I was inside it, I felt it. _Everything_.’ She turns her head to search for Kylo.

He’s standing stock-still, staring at her with an expression of mixed wonder and envy. The glow from the crystals is reflected in his brown eyes, making them shimmer as he murmurs, ‘I felt it too. Through the link… that never happened when I found my crystal.’

Rey peers at the shard in her palm, confused. It looks fairly ordinary, blushing dark pink against her skin: solid gem, but with hair-like needles of rutile shooting from the pointed tip to the base of the crystal. And at the centre of the rutile is a bubble, darker pink than the rest of the crystal, almost purple. It sings to her voicelessly, and she listens intently for a long time before speaking again.

‘Darkheart.’

‘What?’

‘I’m going to name my saber Darkheart. How do I construct it?’

‘You can’t do it here,’ Kylo replies, sitting down beside her. ‘You’ll have to take it back to the base and make it there, align it properly so it doesn’t fucking _explode_ when you turn it on.’ Rey blanches at that, glancing down at the crystal.

Kylo continues. ‘To craft it, you have to go into a trance state. You can’t do that here. It’s meant to be the final test for a Padawan.’

Rey stands up indignantly. ‘But I’m not anywhere near finished training! Why would Master Luke ask me to make my saber when I’m not ready?’

Kylo stares back at her incredulously. ‘Don’t you know _anything_? Think about Order 66. Nowadays, all Padawans need a lightsaber, so they can fight off any Dark siders who might try to kill them before they become full-fledged Jedi.’

Rey rolls her eyes. ‘Right. And he’s sent me to an isolated cave _with_ a Dark sider who might try to kill me. Great plan.’

Kylo knuckles his forehead. ‘I’m not going to try to kill you, Rey.’

‘Scared that a Force-bond with a ghost will drive you insane?’ she says tartly.

Kylo laughs faintly, and there’s a sad undertone to his voice when he replies. ‘No. You already drive me insane.’

Rey sits down again, crossing her legs on the rock floor. ‘How? What do I do?’

‘You _know_ what you do,’ he growls, shifting away from her, raking a hand angrily through his waterlogged curls. ‘You make me lose my focus. You make me do stupid things like jump off cliffs and break bones without a thought. You make me defy my own master in the interest of keeping you safe. You make me feel guilty about shit that I shouldn’t. You make me think about you and dream about you. You make me pursue you across galaxies. You make me love you, and it’s making me insane.’

He glares at her, and Rey does a double take as she absorbs his words.

_… wait, what?_

‘Don’t pretend you didn’t hear.’

But she _needs_ to pretend, at least for a little while, that she didn’t. And so she gets to her feet.

‘Come on. We should get back to the base, so I can make the saber.’

Kylo watches her for a long moment, emotions too transient for her to catch flickering on his face. But then he stands up too, and together they journey back through the crystal caves, Rey pretending the conversation, and her feelings about it, don’t exist.

 --

They’re almost back to the forest when the speeder bike stalls.

‘Bloody hell!’ Rey exclaims, sliding off and trying to open the front panel to examine the engine. Kylo stays where he was, visor hiding his eyes, mouth twisted into a frown.

‘D’you think you could get off and help?’ Rey asks, frustrated. ‘There’s no problem with the engine from what I could see, but maybe the fuel…?’

Kylo dismounts and stands still as a statue at the rear of the bike, his attention caught by something in the trees.

‘Look, Ren, I know you don’t like getting your nails ruined but for gods’ sake-‘

‘Shut up!’ he hisses urgently. And Rey suddenly spots what he’s already seen: a second speeder bike, dark brown and camouflaged against the treetrunks. And they both stare in abject shock as none other than General Hux steps out from the line of trees, flanked by a division of white troopers carrying flamethrowers.

‘Fancy meeting you here, Ren,’ the redhead leers, toying with the signal jammer that killed their bike. ‘Leader Snoke will be enchanted to know that you’ve defected back to the Resistance. He sent us to track you down – the Supreme Leader likes to keep up-to-date with his _investments_.’

 

 


	23. Darkshear

General Hux smiles widely at the pair of them. ‘Ren, I’m amazed you didn’t remember we had a tracking device implanted under your skin when you joined the Order. We do the same to all other Stormtroopers, you know, especially after the FN-2187 debacle. It’s for regulation purposes.’

Kylo Ren is incandescent with rage. ‘I’m not one of your subordinates, fuckstick. You can’t regulate me. And I haven’t _joined_ the Resistance, so fuck off and tell _my_ Master that, you sycophantic little-‘

‘Well, I would, you see, but he actually sent me here to kill you,’ Hux says apologetically, a hard, blazing triumph in his eyes as he gazes at Kylo. Rey feels her hands curl into fists as the obsequious little man keeps talking. ‘He thinks you betrayed the Order, and we can’t have that. So you’re dead, Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, whoever you are. Ashes to ashes and all that.’

He snaps his fingers, and the troopers all ignite their flamethrowers.

‘Oh, and by the way, we’re taking the girl,’ Hux shouts over the roar of the flames as the Flametroopers advance, splitting into two teams as they surround Kylo, separating him from Rey. Two troopers seize her arms, dragging her over to Hux. ‘You’ve had long enough with her.’

Rey tries to use the Force to stun the troopers, but one lowers his flamethrower to her arm and swipes down, searing away a patch of her skin, shriveling muscles and boiling her marrow. She cries out in agony, and as the troopers deliver her to Hux, he takes her affected arm, stroking a thumb lightly along her blistered bicep. He presses hard against the scalded flesh and Rey screams again, impressions of her pain scorching through Kylo’s own muscles.

‘I don’t know what you see in this one, Ren. Far too scrawny. But I’m sure she will make good enough cannon fodder.’ Hux unclips a small, strangely shaped gun from his pocket and flicks a switch on it – it fizzes, bubbling with clear fluid inside the bullet chamber, and he presses the nozzle to Rey’s arm, shooting something directly into her body. She wilts instantly, the link going dead. Hux snaps his fingers at one trooper, who gathers Rey up and slings her limp form over his shoulder.

‘This is the end for you, Kylo Ren. It’s best not to fight. Think of it this way: you’ll get to see the granddaddy you love so much. Death really isn’t so bad, now, is it?’ Hux’s normally tight face is slack with depraved glee, and he and the trooper walk over to their speeder bike and kick it into action, climbing aboard. They roar off into the trees, leaving Kylo with the remaining Flametroopers, five flamethrowers burning toxic naphtha perilously close to his clothes. He has no lightsaber to defend himself with, no blaster, nothing. His mother has unwittingly signed his death warrant.

But he still has the Force. And so Kylo Ren reaches with all his might for the darkness within and without, and as a Flametrooper cuts a burning swath through the air, aiming for Kylo’s chest, he flings out his hand and hurls both man and weapon against a tree-trunk. He knows from the resounding _crack_ that the trooper’s spinal cord has snapped,, and the flamethrower bursts open on the ground, spilling petrol and tiny sparks onto the dry prairie, which ignites with a _whoomph_.

The other Flametroopers surround him, jabbing at him with their fiery torches, but Kylo has cast a black bubble of Force energy around himself, shielding him from the inferno as they try to roast him alive. He throws both of his hands up to the sky, as if appealing to an ambiguous God, and the bubble bursts, spewing shockwaves of dark energy into the atmosphere, knocking the flamethrowers out of his attackers’ hands and sweeping the men off their feet. He methodically summons all the flamethrowers to him with a powerful beckon, and crushes them in midair, fuel shooting out of the crumpled mechanisms and igniting more of the grass, baby flames becoming a raging fire in seconds. And then Kylo runs.

He can’t use the goddamn speeder because it’s been configured to Rey’s fingerprints, but he still has the link. Her end is numbly silent, but her ears still hear and her heart still beats and he follows the faint sounds, a spatial map forming in his mind as he races through the trees, scrambling over buttress roots and mossy rocks, the crackling roar of the flames growing weaker as he outruns the blaze, the forest swallowing him.

The bond is so strong now – he can feel flutters of Rey’s heartbeat inside his own chest, hers slow and intermittent, his racing and pounding as though it’s trying to punch its way through the bone cage of his ribs. He runs harder, panting now; the link between them drawing him to her, like metal filings to a magnet.

He refuses to let himself think that he’ll be too late to save her. And as he crashes through a thorned hedge, a hidden First Order space shuttle comes into view, and Kylo Ren almost shouts with the relief of it. He slows to a quiet, catlike walk as he ascends the rubber ramp into the shuttle, taking pains not to make his presence known as he creeps into the cockpit, where a uniformed pilot is busy programming the controls.

Kylo pauses for a moment, then raises a black-gloved hand and curls it into a tight fist, willing the pilot’s windpipe to crush. He feels it through the Force as the man’s throat crumples like papier-mache, and he exalts in the passion of the act, the raw, prehistoric excitement of _killing_ overwhelming him before he remembers what he’s come here to do. He ransacks the pilot’s corpse, finding a small pocketknife and taking it.

He casts out with the Force, locating the trooper who’d carried Rey on the cannon deck. He sneaks through the open door and spots the offender. Kylo conceals his footsteps with the Force, becoming nothing but an insubstantial shade as he steals up behind the trooper, who is checking the stocks of gunpowder. With one ruthless motion, he carves the knife across the unprotected space between armour plates, and blood sprays the cannon deck, misting on Kylo’s hand. The trooper collapses, voiding himself as he bleeds out, and Kylo turns his back, wiping a hand over his clothing as he heads towards the command centre of the shuttle, guessing that’s where Hux will be.

He’s proven right. Easing the door open, a grisly sight is burned into his retina. Hux has tied Rey to the steel table at the centre of the room: her head is lolling to one side, her right arm charred and red as rare meat, and dark blood streams from a freshly broken nose, the skin under her eyes beginning to blacken – the general had _hit_ her while she was unconscious.

Hux is bending over Rey, and Kylo watches in revulsion as the general, holding some medieval, pear-shaped torture instrument, grips Rey’s legs and spreads her knees apart, beginning to slide her trousers off-

He can’t take it. _‘Don’t. Fucking. Touch. Her.’_

Hux slowly turns around, dropping the instrument, lips peeling back over his teeth in a lecherous smile. ‘What are you going to do, Ren? Wave your magic hands and throw me into a wall again?’

Kylo steps forward and Hux backs away, continuing to taunt him. ‘Obviously your little whore means a great deal to you, for you to come so quickly – who would have thought? Kylo Ren, the lovesick swain. When Supreme Leader hears what the scavenger has reduced you to-‘

‘He’s not going to hear,’ Kylo says evenly, and he raises a hand and casually immobilizes the General. Hux’s lips twitch, his eyes betraying his fear as Kylo approaches him, standing still in front of his prisoner as he considers what to do. ‘By the time you crawl back to him like the lowly, pathetic piece of _shit_ you are, you won’t have any parts to communicate with.’

And he pulls back his fist and punches Hux so hard that the man’s head rocks back on the column of his spine, nearly snapping.

The general spits out a tooth, blood dribbling down his chin as he smiles at Kylo Ren. ‘You… were never good… at sharing,’ he giggles, seemingly high on the pain from Kylo’s punch. So Kylo hits him again, slugging Hux so hard in the stomach that he doubles over, still otherwise immobilized, unable to lift his feet from the floor.

‘Or at controlling your temper,’ the general groans, as Kylo grabs a fistful of ginger hair and yanks him upright. ‘ _You_ are pathetic, and a child. You will never be what Lord Vader was.’

‘Maybe not,’ Kylo hisses. ‘But maybe I’m something worse.’

The General scoffs at him through the blood that pools in his mouth. ‘What are you, Ren, you sick fuck?’

Kylo gazes at Hux, his ebony eyes swirling with something more than hatred. Shadows, or silent demons; shifting, gathering strength. Then-

‘I am the Dark side,’ he says simply, and he releases every iota of the Force he had drawn into himself. Energy jolts from his hands, an ethereal _hush_ emanating through the command deck as black, wispy shadows gush from his fingertips, forming into a solid, jagged black bolt that hurls itself at the General, impaling him between two ribs.

As soon as the spear hits its target, it dissolves into curlicues of smoke, evaporating into thin air. Hux lets out a breathy sigh and falls to his knees, blood leaking from his mouth, but not from his chest.

Kylo is both stunned and enraptured by what his hands have created: it’s a _Darkshear_ , a spear of midnight black, forged by both will and pure, unfiltered Dark Force energy; a deadly weapon that has been wielded by few Dark Jedi in history. And he’s just joined the ranks.

With renewed confidence, he bends down over the fallen Hux and checks his clothes – they haven’t been pierced. There’s no hole, no entry or exit wound. But somehow, the General has been run through, and his life is ebbing away, his taut countenance loosening, ice-blue eyes sliding shut.

Kylo brings his mouth very close to the General’s ear. ‘Tell me, General Hux – how does it feel to die alone, without honour or valour, unrecognized for everything you struggled to achieve?’

He feels the General’s rage flare in answer, his arm lifting slightly as if to strike Ren, but then his weight sags back into the metal floor of the shuttle, and Hux lies deathly still.

Kylo smiles and stood up, turning towards Rey. And he realizes with a shock that she’s _awake_. She doesn’t have enough strength to lift her head from the slab of the table, but her eyes are open and rapidly filling with tears as she stares at the ceiling. He doesn’t know how much she heard, but if the tears are anything to judge by, she’d at least been awake for the end of the confrontation.

 _I am the Dark side_ , he’d said, and he’d known it to be true. No matter how much Rey might fantasize about him becoming _Good_ , tell him that there was light inside him, he will never walk the path of the Light. Ben Solo had always held the Dark close, even before he had been reborn as Kylo Ren. And he knows that Rey is starting to recognize that. And it _hurts_ her, he realizes, her thoughts uninhibited as the link resurrects itself between them.

It hurts her, because she loves him. In the same way as he loves her, only more pure, more selfless – she wants to see the best in him, and he’s denied her that with every act of murder, betrayal or Dark act he commits. It’s _incredible to him_ that he had summoned a Darkshear without any prior training or instruction, but for Rey it’s proof that he is everything she’d hoped he wouldn’t be. The living embodiment of the Dark side, somebody whose acts made them irredeemable. A tortured shade, joining hands with the monstrosities they walked with on their path to infamy.

The complete opposite of her.

 _You are the Dark Side_ , her voice whispers to him across the nexus between their minds.

 _And you are the Light_ , he replies, abandoning Hux’s prone corpse to untie Rey. He lifts her into his arms, and she gazes up at him, her cheeks and chin bloodstained, her hazel eyes glistening with unshed tears.

_You’ll never come back to the Light, will you?_

Kylo sighs. _You can’t have light without the dark, Rey. This is who I’ve always been._

She reaches out with her burned arm, her fingers weakly touching his cheek. _I wish it wasn’t,_ she thinks, and she lapses into unconsciousness again.

 

____________________________

Sources for this chapter:

[Darkshear](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darkshear)

[Force Bubble/Force Protection](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_Protection) 


	24. Legacy

Rey’s slight weight barely inhibits Kylo as he carries her through the command deck and out of the shuttle, spying General Hux’s speeder bike, strewn with Rey’s beige dress and pants, conveniently left at the bow of the ship. He positions Rey on the back of the bike, climbing in front of her and winding her uninjured arm around his waist before he starts the engine.

They soar away from the shuttle just as the bushfire catches up to them, trails of yellow flame leaping from tree to tree in the wake of their speeder. Kylo is nowhere near as skilled a driver as Rey, but he relies on his reflexes and Force-sight to guide them through the maze of treetrunks safely, if jerkily. He has to keep turning round to readjust Rey so she doesn’t slip off the bike, and at one point they almost careen headlong into a tree, but after a terrifying half hour they cannonball out of the woods, zooming up the alleys of the city centre again.

Kylo dumps the First Order bike outside the senate building and rushes up to the doors, Rey gathered in his arms. The doors are sealed, of course, with no sentinels posted. _Shit_.

He sets Rey down on the pavement, carefully arranging her injured arm so that it won’t touch the ground. And then he closes his eyes and casts out with the Force, trying to find the all-too-familiar blue Force signature of Luke Skywalker.

_Skywalker, we’re back. The First Order found us. Rey is injured. We- I need help. Please._

Exhausted, he kneels down next to Rey, cradling her head in his lap, her hair falling out of its trademark three buns. There’s a hiss of hydraulics and the doors open, Luke and Leia hurrying out. Luke takes Rey from Kylo, leaving him with his mother, whose expression is brimming with mistrust.

‘What did you do, Ben?’ she asks angrily.

He bridles at the injustice of that. ‘I did nothing, _Mother_ , except save the girl. The First Order knew I was here, they tracked and ambushed us. If _you_ hadn’t stripped me of my lightsaber, Rey wouldn’t have been hurt.’

Leia narrows her eyes at him as he stands. ‘Why would the First Order hunt you?’

Kylo runs his hand through his knotted hair, distressed. ‘Snoke thinks I have deserted him, apparently. He sent his lapdog to kill me and take Rey for himself – he wants her for his new apprentice. I killed General Hux to get her back, so if I wasn’t already a public enemy, I am now.’

Leia’s mouth drops open. ‘But that means…’

‘There will be a price on my head. Your _abduction_ of me has caused all sorts of problems, and I...’

 _I can never return to the First Order_ , he finishes inside his head. Snoke had told him that if he wanted to preserve any scrap of faith the Supreme Leader had in him, he was to take Rey to Moraband. But he had been kidnapped instead, and Snoke had obviously thought he’d gone willingly with his mother, switching sides – there had been no witnesses to prove otherwise. He is now as much an enemy of the Order as his mother, if not more so. This was clearly a personal affront to Snoke, if he’d sent Kylo’s number one rival to murder him.

He doesn’t know how to process the complete and utter annihilation of everything he’d worked and trained for fifteen years to accomplish – so Kylo laughs. Uproariously, uncontrollably, he laughs until his lungs can’t inflate, until he can’t draw breath. Leia stares at him, her arms folded, as he wheezes like a dying man.

‘This is all… a massive… misunderstanding,’ he chokes out at last, between bouts of hysteria. ‘And it’s all your fault. Congratulations, you got your son back. But not for long, because the _entirety_ of the Dark Side, every bounty hunter and death gang, will be hunting me now that they think I’ve defected. There won’t be a more reviled man in the galaxy than Kylo Ren.’

Leia reaches out, and this time he lets her make contact. She cups his face with a tender hand, just as his other parent had done on the oscillator bridge, and says, ‘Then maybe it’s time to let Kylo Ren go.’

He rears away from her. ‘And do _what_ , mother? Become Ben Solo again? This isn’t one of your fucking fairytales – it’s not that easy.’

‘Why isn’t it?’ she challenges him, her gaze steely.

Kylo throws up his hands. ‘You’ve never understood who I am. Not since you sent me away to that godforsaken temple. You still blindly believe in the idea of a _good_ son, but that was never _me_. Snoke saw me for what I was: light and dark, with equal potential for both, but the choice was mine to make. I made it: I chose the darkness.’

‘What you _chose_ was an astral projection that groomed you and indoctrinated you from childhood,’ Leia says heatedly. ‘Where’s the choice in that, Ben? We sent you to Luke because you were faltering, and we couldn’t help you.’

‘ _You didn’t even try_ ,’ he snarls, bending down to his mother’s level. ‘You think I didn’t know what you and Han Solo talked about? I know you both thought there was something wrong with me. So you pushed me off onto Skywalker because you couldn’t deal with having an imperfect son.’

Leia shakes her head manically. ‘That’s not true at all!’

‘Is it not? What’s your excuse, then? What do you tell yourself to help you sleep at night?’

Leia blinks up at him, her brown eyes moist. ‘That we were doing the right thing. Luke wanted to show you the ways of the Jedi, teach you to control your powers, make you see that succumbing to the darkness was the easy way out. He knew Vader more intimately than I did, saw how hate and fear destroyed him. _We didn’t want it to destroy you, too.’_

Leia stands there, shaking from the emotional outpouring, and Kylo can’t bring himself to quarrel with her anymore. He’s numb, unfeeling as he walks past his mother into the compound. And as the doors slide closed behind him, separating mother and son, he murmurs to himself, ‘Too late.’

 --

Rey awakes to the gagging sensation of a tube scraping the inside of her throat, bright halogen lights above her head and the mechanical beeps of a med-droid as it bustles around her, checking bandages and administering a clear serum directly into her burned arm through an IV. She tries to sit up, but she’s strapped to her bed with white cuffs.

Lately, she’s spent too many hours tied down to various surfaces, and she is heartily sick of it. So Rey focuses her intent, and wills the tube to float up and out of her oesophagus. It does, slowly, making her retch all the while. When she’s free of it, she turns her head and speaks to the med-droid, schooling her voice to be neutral and inflectionless.

‘You will remove these bonds and fetch Luke Skywalker from his chambers,’ she intones.

The med-droid buzzes, clanking up to her stretcher. ‘Mind tricks and other foolish nonsense do not work on artificial intelligence,’ it drones. It holds up a staple-gun and shoots something directly into her arm. She feels a solid object settle in her flesh and almost gags.

‘What are you doing? I didn’t need that.’

‘Everybody who works for the rebel faction must have an immunochip, to protect against disease or unwanted gestational implantation,’ it whirs again.

Rey squints at the droid, trying to look threatening. ‘Listen – go and get Luke Skywalker, or I’ll have to electrocute you. Do you want to find out whether _that_ works on droids?’

‘Your next bacta patch is due to be applied in two minutes,’ it protested.

‘You’d better hurry, then,’ she says, staring at the droid unblinkingly until it turns around and zips off, beeping indignantly. Rey chuckles to herself, lying back on the hospital bed. Her arm tingles slightly from the bacta, and her nose aches when she twitches it, but the constant pain that had gnawed at her flesh is gone, the damage from the flamethrower almost reversed. There’s no balm for the psychological hurt, though. There are white vacuums of empty space in between her memories of the kidnapping, but she knows that Hux had injected her with an anaesthetic, that she had woken up with her pants halfway down, beaten bloody, the brutal noises of the general’s death playing out as she stared at the roof of the space shuttle he’d taken her to.

She feels sick, the words _I am the Dark Side_ repeating on a loop inside her brain, along with the shocking sounds of fists connecting with bone, the general’s breath gurgling through a mouthful of blood, the otherworldly whispers of whatever Dark illusion Kylo Ren had conjured for the killing blow.

She hums to herself, trying to drown out the aural torture. And then the door opens and Luke Skywalker rushes in with the med droid, accompanied by none other than her savior and her antihero, the man who had both tried to kill her and killed for her.

She groans. ‘What is he doing here?’

‘Oh, you’re _welcome_ ,’ Kylo snaps, at the same time as Luke says, ‘Ben is still under supervision as a prisoner. He was with me when you requested my presence. He explained everything. Rey, how are you feeling?’

‘Oh, you know. Recently fixed broken nose, healed burn, countless injections from a satanic med-droid and an immuno-contraceptive chip inserted without my consent. All in all, pretty damn great. And I’d feel even better if I wasn’t in cuffs,’ she cracks, lifting her hands to show Luke the restraints. He waves a hand at them and they slip off. Rey flexes her arm, testing for any residual pain. The skin is still swollen, and the droid whizzes over to her with another bacta patch, expertly removing the previous one.

‘Do you still have your kyber crystal?’ Luke asks, and Rey moves to check her pockets – but she’s dressed in an open-backed hospital gown.

‘Uhh… I put it in my trouser pocket, but I don’t know where my clothes are.’

Kylo hails the med-droid. ‘Where did you store her clothes?’

‘In the fumigation closet,’ it beeps, and Kylo swears, running out of the room. Luke and Rey look at eachother in half-amusement, half-panic.

‘I thought he wasn’t allowed to wander the base alone?’

‘Leia doesn’t want him going solo,’ Luke says semi-seriously, but makes no move to go after him.

Soon enough, Ren bursts back into the room, Rey’s clothes scrunched in his arms. He dumps them at the foot of her hospital bed, and Rey rifles through the pants pockets, growing steadily more panicked until her scrabbling fingers touch the point of the crystal. She fishes it out, placing it in her palm to show to her master.

‘Striking colour,’ Luke remarks, inspecting the fragment. ‘Pink kyber crystals are quite rare.’ He looks up at Rey. ‘Are you fit to begin the process of making your lightsaber?’

She frowns, uncertain. ‘But Kylo said it was the final test for a Padawan. I’m nowhere near ready – I haven’t mastered most Force powers yet, or any of the fighting Forms you showed me.’

Luke smiles gently at her. ‘It depends on the _potential_ of the pupil, not whether they have completed their training. You must go to a meditation chamber – there are a few on this base – and merge with the Force, and with your crystal. You have to test the inner lattice of the kyber crystal for any defaults or abnormalities, and construct your saber around these faults. Material will be provided for you to assemble the hilt, but it is all done telekinetically – a Force power I know you already have in spades.’

His tone grows somber. ‘You have to make the lightsaber now, Rey. If what Ben says is true, and the First Order knows that you’re here, it won’t be long before they strike again. Snoke wants you with him, and you need to be able to defend yourself with the best weapon possible. Now, both of you come with me. Rey, I will show you to a meditation chamber and have food brought to you. Ben, we need to talk in depth.’

He strides out of the room, expecting his former and current Padawans to follow. Kylo helps Rey off the table and turns his back while she struggles into her slightly singed clothes, and together they walk after the last Jedi.


	25. Darkheart

Luke leads Rey and Kylo down a maze of corridors in the northern wing of the senate building, finally stopping outside a steel door with a placard that read ‘Private Property of Ezra Bridger.’ Rey raises an eyebrow questioningly, but Luke shakes his head. ‘Another time.’

He opens the door, revealing a room decorated in shades of imperial purple, with satin cushions scattered over the floor, presumably for meditation. Rey sits down on one of the cushions, crossing her legs as a service droid whirrs into the room after her, depositing a tray of food: simple fare, protein porridge and one large Jogan fruit. She picks at it as the droid circles, lighting the votive candles at the corners of the room, bathing the room in a soft yellow glow.

Luke hovers in the doorframe with Kylo, reminding her to use the Force to check the crystal for any flaws, and build a functional saber around them. She still has no idea what he’s talking about, but figures she can only really learn by trial and error. So she nods and smiles feebly as Luke closes the door again, leaving her in total silence. Perfect for meditation.

She closes her eyes, imagining all the troublesome thoughts and stress of the last few days being extracted from her mind, physical strands that burn up in the candle flames like sparklers. Once her head is clear, she takes the crystal out of her pocket again, cradling it in her hands and tracing the facets of its structure. She slows her breathing, the net of the Force dilating behind her eyes again as she searches for the kyber crystal’s presence in the web of energy. There it is, glowing magenta next to her own pearlescent light, blending with her Force signature to become a pale primrose colour.

She zooms in on the pink light, further and further as the colour blurs and deepens and suddenly, she’s inside the dark heart of the crystal, bubbles of trapped liquid suspended before her eyes, paper-thin rutile filaments swaying with her movements. She explores each individual hairlike projection, plucking them like lute strings as she tests the crystal for weakness.

She examines its matrix for hours, from every angle, checking for anything that isn’t symmetrical, occasionally shifting a few strands of rutile or repositioning a bubble. The outside of the crystal is in perfect equilibrium, however, and there’s not much to be done.

She begins to picture the complete lightsaber: it will be double bladed, she imagines, to recall the design of her quarterstaff, and the hilt will be composed of metal. She begins to pore over every detail of the design inside her head, starting with the power cell and insulator, crafting them in such detail in her thoughts that she can _feel_ them, reach out and touch them with the Force – the small components that begin to assemble to make her weapon. She painstakingly weaves the specifics of the focusing lens, the stabilizing loop for the plasma, the length of the hilt, imagining it in a polished black metal, reminiscent of the walls of the _Black Dahlia_.

The pieces of her lightsaber slot together like tetris cubes inside the Force, and there’s an audible _click_ somewhere in front of her face. She gradually withdraws herself from the Force web, receding back to her body.

She opens her eyes to see her finished lightsaber, suspended in midair, small hilt compartment open to receive the kyber shard she still clutches in her hand. She takes the saber out of the air and drops the crystal into the compartment. It glows bright mauve as it sinks into the stabilizing loop, and Rey’s fingers trace the finished design: the aerodynamics of the metal, how light it feels in her hand. She hesitates for a moment, and then presses the switch. With a roar, dark pink light gushes out of either end of the hilt, almost blinding Rey with the intensity of the colour. It’s darker in the centre, just like the crystal, bright pink deepening to plum.

 _Darkheart_ , she thinks, and she can hear the crystal singing its jubilance, finally home. Rey stands up in excitement, experimentally twirling the hilt of the saber in her hand, slow at first and then faster and faster, the blades becoming one giant pinwheel of fuschia light.

She lashes out with the saber, spinning it one way and another, striking like a serpent at thin air. The saber is almost weightless in her hands, so responsive to every movement. She _has_ to tell Master Luke - when he eventually comes back -that she wants to train in the saber Forms with Darkheart.

 --

Meanwhile, back in Luke’s private quarters, the last Jedi is embroiled in an heated discussion with his nephew.

‘If you are truly going to be hunted by the First Order, the Resistance is in no shape to protect you. We are restricted to the use of one fleet since the Order destroyed Hosnian Prime and its Starfleet, so if they did launch an ordered assault, we would die. Your best hope is leaving the planet. If Rey is to be hunted too, you’ll have to take her with you. Teach her, as I taught you, the ways of the Force. The _Light_ ,’ he emphasizes as Kylo smirks.

‘I already offered to show her the ‘ways of the Force’. She gave me this in answer.’ Kylo gestures to the facial scar. ‘I’m not inclined to ask again. And what makes you think we’d be safer on any other planet than here? Snoke tracked me once through the Force, he’ll do it again.’

Luke bites his lower lip, a million different scenarios running through his head. He grimaces at one particular idea that pops into his mind – the very thought is abominable to a Jedi – but it could be the only chance to save Rey and Ben both, so he voices it.

‘Ben… have you ever considered the implications of the Rule of Two?’

Kylo’s lips quirk up into a sardonic smile. ‘You mean the apprentice rising up and killing his master?’

‘I hate myself for even suggesting it, but… couldn’t you challenge Snoke? You are an exceptionally talented Force user, you _could_ overthrow him. I’m sure he expects it to happen someday – why not now?’

Kylo rubs his temples reflexively, irritated. ‘There’s a reason he never completed my training, and why he’s been around for aeons. He wants to lead, forever. He might actually be chasing immortality: the last few times I’d spoken with him, he’d been playing with various crystals and tinctures.’

‘And he didn’t complete your training because-‘

‘He wants me to be strong, but not strong enough to take him on and win. It would be a spectacular suicide, but suicide nonetheless. And if I did defeat him, what would I do? What of my mother’s persistent hope that I will return to the Light? If I won, I would inherit all that he is, become the next immortal Sith Lord.’ He wavers for a moment, admitting: ‘Until now, I was content to follow him.’

Luke frowns introspectively, his emotions palpable: indecision, fear, a smudge of hope. ‘Ben… if you are _wholly_ committed to the dark path you are on… though I go against your mother’s every wish by saying this, it would be better for you to be the Supreme Leader than Snoke. You still have light in you. His was smothered long ago. You can disband the First Order, hunt down the archives of the Sith…’

‘And what makes you think I’d do any of that?’ Kylo exclaims. ‘I would be more likely to grow the First Order’s troops and try to rule the galaxy, as mad with power and delusions of grandeur as Snoke is!’

‘You’re still human,’ Luke snarls back. ‘He never was. You _feel_.’

‘I feel _nothing_ ,’ Kylo contradicts, getting close to his uncle’s weary face. ‘Nothing but contempt for the Jedi order, nothing but pity for a poor old man who tries to convince me to become the next twisted ruler for his own means. Perhaps you want me to rise to the rank of Sith Lord so you can kill me publicly, and restore faith in the ways of the Jedi.’

‘I don’t want to kill you, goddammit!’ Luke loses his temper completely, leaping to his feet and stalking the length of the room like a captive tiger. ‘You’re my _family_ , you little shit – the son of my best friend and sister! For years after what you did, all I could think about was the sweet little boy who turned his back on every gift he’d been given, drowned every sliver of light in the tsunami of anger and fear and hate inside him. I felt every tremor of your destruction in the Force. Every death at your hand was like indirectly ripping the galaxy apart, because I still felt like I could have stopped it if I’d tried harder. But it’s not true.’ His face is pained as he stared at his nephew. ‘Leia still believes you can be redeemed, but I don’t think so. You can’t cancel out the blood on your hands by saving one girl, even if she is my Padawan. Leia doesn’t know you spared Rey at the Jedi temple – I don’t know what it would do to her, but nothing, _nothing_ , can repair the damage you’ve caused, Ben.’

‘Why?’ he finally asks, his voice breaking, all the anger melting from his tired body. ‘Why did you kill them, Ben? Why didn’t you kill Rey?’

Kylo gawks at his uncle in disbelief. In all his shared time with Luke Skywalker, the man had been preternaturally poised, passive and tranquil. And yet the man who stands before him now, who has just had an emotional outburst akin to the ones Kylo is so prone to, seems more like _his_ uncle than he ever had. And so he grants him one small truth.

‘Snoke knows of this, on some level. When I came to him after failing to interrogate Rey, he told me I was weak, because I have compassion for her. He’s not wrong. He doesn’t know the backstory, but I didn’t kill her because of that compassion. Rey was the only pupil of yours not to treat me like a total pariah – she knew my name, she smiled whenever I was nearby. But she was so lonely, dumped at the temple by her parents, and I empathized.’

‘So instead you commissioned a First Order pilot to fly you and Rey to Jakku, leaving a four year old child to live a life of even greater loneliness and neglect? Because of your great sense of _empathy_?’ Luke says scathingly. Kylo scowls.

‘You can mock me, uncle, but it’s true. And the bottom line is: I’m still weak. My training is unfinished. If I were to go up against the Supreme Leader, I would die in seconds. I’m sure my martyrdom would please the masses, though.’

‘There has been a bit of a mob baying for your blood on Coruscant, I hear,’ Luke agrees mildly. ‘Word reached the Core that Leia has taken you captive – the rest of the rebel army want an eye for an eye. Fortunately, if you take my advice, you and Rey will be gone long before the New Republic sends their inquisitors here for your trial.’

Kylo’s face registers his shock and outrage. ‘So the whole ‘kill my master’ speech was just a ruse? You want us off the planet because if we don’t leave I’ll be subjected to a criminal trial?’

‘ _Ben_.’ Luke grabs Kylo’s arm, clinging hard to stop the taller man from walking away. ‘You are an enemy of the senate; the galaxy despises you, if you are caught you will most certainly be killed for your crimes. But if you rid the galaxy of Snoke and the First Order, it will count in your favour when they tally your sins. You said yourself you can never return to the First Order – but did you really think the New Republic would let you slide into their society without carrying out their brand of justice? You’re not safe on either side of this war.’

‘I know you’ve lived as Snoke’s puppet for almost all your life – aren’t you tired of having someone else pull the strings? Cut the ties; take some responsibility for your destiny, Ben. I know how you feel about Rey, and how she feels about you. You saved her life - now it’s up to you to save yours.’

Kylo yanks his arm out of his uncle’s hold. ‘You are raving, uncle. You make it sound as if they’re coming to put me to death right now.’

Luke shakes his head wildly. ‘The situation is not that dire yet. But I know from Leia’s reports that they are considering sending a team of inquisitors here while you are still prisoner. She will most likely make a case for you, but the voice of a biased mother won’t stand up against the billions of angry ones throughout the universe.’

He catches his breath, and his voice is gruff with emotion when he speaks again. ‘Please, Ben. Take Rey. Fly to a safe space. Moraband contains the tomb of Darth Bane and the archives of the Sith order – you can complete your training there.’

‘But it’s occupied-‘

‘The Force is with you. I know it.’

‘ _The Force_ isn’t going to fucking help! Snoke’s had a tracking device inside me for years, he’ll know the second I step off the ship!’

‘So, the First Order still keeps records of their mercenaries? There is something I can do about that,’ Luke mutters, and he raises a hand, closing his eyes and moving his palm over Kylo’s form, seeming to X-ray him from head to toe. He opens his eyes, and they crinkle at the corners in a wry smile.

‘The device is in your arm. If you break the skin, I can remove it.’

Kylo wordlessly walks to the kitchen area of Luke’s quarters, opens a drawer and removed a carving knife. He slices a thin, deep line into the skin of his arm, blood dribbling from the cut as he holds it out to Luke. His uncle concentrates, his fingers moving a fraction, and Kylo feels something dislodge from layers of muscle tissue, speeding towards the slit in his flesh. Up and out it shoots, and Luke catches it deftly in hand before giving it to his nephew.

Kylo examines the tracking chip for a moment – such a small, insignificant thing, his last connection to the First Order. He puts it on the floor.

And he grinds the chip into metal dust under his boot.

 

 


	26. Requiem

‘Please, Ben. Go to Moraband,’ Luke repeats for what seems like the hundredth time.

‘Alright, _alright_!’ Kylo concedes, palms up in a gesture of defeat. ‘Just stop nagging.’

‘Deal,’ Luke heaves a sigh of relief and walks over to open the door. ‘Onto the next order of business then – it’s about time we checked on Rey’s progress.’

Kylo frowns, puzzled. ‘It’s been five hours – she won’t be anywhere near done.’

Luke grins drily. ‘She never ceases to amaze us both. I’d wager she finished an hour ago.’

Kylo stomps out the door, Luke close behind him. They navigate the corridors back to Ezra Bridger’s office, and stop at the helicopter-like sounds of an active lightsaber they can hear through the walls.

Luke knocks on the door, and the spinning noises stop. ‘Er… come in?’

They enter, taking a few seconds to register the sight: Rey is standing in a combative pose, holding an ordinary metal hilt in her raised hand. As they watch, she thumbs the switch, and hot pink light bursts forth from either end of the hilt, buzzing strongly unlike Kylo’s crackling, unstable saber. Hers is double bladed, shaped like the staff she’d been accustomed to using on Jakku, and the beams are elongated and sharp, a glowing scar embossed on the wall she’d hit by accident when practicing.

Luke whistles admiringly. ‘That’s quite the creation, Padawan. Especially in such a short amount of time.’

Kylo’s eyes almost roll out of their sockets. ‘Really?’

Luke ignores him, holding out a hand for Rey’s weapon. She gives it to him and he tests the balance of the hilt with a finger, then switches it on and gives the saberstaff a few experimental twirls.

‘This is very _you_ ,’ he comments, and Rey flushes with pleasure.

‘I’d like to learn the saber Forms with this one, Luke,’ she says shyly. ‘I know the names and the descriptions, but not the techniques.’

‘Then you will learn them. And soon. If you’ll excuse me, I have to make some arrangements.’ He inclines his head politely, then hurries off in the direction of the starship hangar, leaving Kylo and Rey behind in Bridger’s office. She gives him an inquiring look, and he shrugs.

‘Shall we go outside? The room’s a bit cramped,’ Rey suggests, and strides out without waiting for his answer. She negotiates the twisting corridors easily, Kylo trailing distantly behind her as she makes her way through the sliding glass doors of the compound.

The doors close before he can walk through after her, and Kylo is about to wave them open again when he feels a flurry of sudden emotion through their link: _surprise, shock, a flood of joy_. And then he hears an excited yell outside, and the rogue Stormtrooper and another man, this one in a stinging orange flight suit, are racing up to Rey, leaping at her like overgrown monkeys and enveloping her in such a vigorous hug that he _feels_ it, feels the strong pairs of arms squeezing his chest. It’s a squeamish sensation for him, being hugged, and he brushes at his torso intuitively, sweeping the feeling away.

The sight of FN-2187 makes Kylo’s stomach burn with corrosive hate – revenge for the inflicted saber-burns is still on his personal agenda. He watches from behind the plate-glass as the two men take Rey’s arms and guide her off to the side of the senate building, out of Kylo’s eyeline.

He can’t see her anymore, but he can still feel every jolt of happiness, every giggle as the traitor tells her about his latest escapades. He could eavesdrop through the link, but for some reason, the idea of listening to her chatter with her friends is cloying to him. The whole concept of friendship is – for the past fifteen years he’d had allies, followers, but no-one he could have called a friend. And he’d liked it that way. There were no secrets shared, no leaning on one another for support, no saccharine conversations about love and life and the _theory_ of everything.

Friendship is an abomination. But as Rey giggles again, the cadence of her laughter playing inside his head, Kylo wonders if there aren’t parts of friendship that he’s missed out on.

 --

The doors of the compound have just closed behind Rey, and she breathes in the cool air of Lothal’s dusk, admiring the black stencils the spine-trees make against the greying skyline.

‘ _Rey_!’

She recognises the bellowing voice, and before she can turn around, two pairs of arms are encircling her, lifting her into the air as her surprise flows into delight, recognising the people attached to the arms. ‘Poe! Finn!’

‘Rey, oh god-‘

‘It’s so good to-‘

‘Where have you _been_?!’

They all yell over eachother, clamoring until Poe, the voice of reason, raises a hand and ends the ruckus.

‘We just got back from a surveillance mission to Moraband. BB-8’s in the shop, getting fitted with some new gear, so I brought Finn instead. He’s a great wing-man. Sorry,’ the charismatic pilot grins. ‘I’ve deprived you of him, I know.’

‘It’s only been a couple of days, dude,’ Finn groans, his expression fond. ‘But Rey, how are you? Word got to us that First Order troops attempted another kidnap – I wanted to back out of the mission right away, but we were ordered to stay the course. _What happened_?’

Rey swallows the lump in her throat that rose at her friends’ concern for her safety. That feeling, of being cared about, _important to someone_ , is still so alien to her, even after everything that’s happened in the past months. She starts to relay the story, omitting the parts about her relations with Kylo, simply stating that he had accompanied her on her quest to retrieve a kyber crystal, and rescued her from a First Order general.

Finn grimaces oddly at that. ‘So… he betrayed the First Order to save you? That doesn’t fit with what I know about Kylo Ren – the man abducted you himself, nearly twice! And what the hell was the General thinking to send _him_ with you in the first place – if I’d been here, _I’d_ have gone.’

Rey bites her lip and nods. ‘I can’t pretend to understand her motives, but… Finn, I think Kylo and you have more in common than you think.’

Finn’s eyebrows meet his hairline. ‘Are you serious? When did I display any murderous tendencies in the time we’ve known eachother?’

Rey smiles at the mental image of sweet, bumbling, heroic Finn as a Sith Lord. ‘I just mean that he’s left the First Order now, too. He rescued me.’

‘He also _tortured_ you, and Poe. He almost killed me. He once ordered us to massacre an entire village on Jakku, and I saw him cut down a defenseless old man just for backchatting. Rescuing you doesn’t change the fact that he’s a _bad person_ , Rey.’

Poe nodded solemnly, echoing Finn’s sentiment.

‘I know that,’ Rey says softly. Hearing Kylo’s litany of misdeeds makes her remember that truthful moment on General Hux’s shuttle, when he’d told her that he had always been Dark. And _that_ reminds her of his confession in the crystal cave – No. She won’t let herself think about that. The fact that such a monstrous man might feel _that_ way about her is too unsettling.

Nobody speaks for a long beat, and then Poe lightens the mood, asking about the saber Rey had made. She shows it off, doing various acrobatic tricks for her audience, and afterwards, the three of them walk back into the compound together, splitting up outside the cafeteria as Finn and Poe go to grab dinner, and Rey returns to her dormitory.

She’s scarcely closed the door when Kylo’s voice bursts uninvited into her head. _Rey. Come to my room._

So many interruptions tonight, only some of them welcome. _Ask nicely_ , she shoots back across the link.

He sighs, long and loud, but humours her. _Please come to my room._

 _Fine_. She grabs a Corellian apple from the tray the service droids had delivered while she was outside, and devours it on the walk to Kylo’s guarded dorm. She licks the sweetness from her lips as she slips past the sentries, knocking and entering.

She finds him on the couch, flicking disinterestedly through the history book Luke had left them. He looks up when she comes in, eyes dark and unreadable again.

‘Did you have fun with your friends?’ he asks stiffly, and she gives him a querying look.

‘Er, yes?’

‘Good, because I have some bad news. Skywalker’s kicking us out.’

Rey’s eyebrows knit. ‘What, out of the senate building?’

‘More like off the planet,’ Kylo elucidates. ‘Apparently both the New Republic and the First Order know we’re here, and they’re both coming to collect. If we don’t leave, you’re captured and I’m dead, either by assassination or by a lawful trial and hanging. He wants us to fly to Moraband and lay low for a while.’

Rey looks scandalized. ‘Your mother wouldn’t let the New Republic give you the death sentence! She’s royalty!

Kylo shakes his head. ‘Leia Organa _was_ royalty, on Alderaan. The Galactic Senate doesn’t recognise former planets – she carries no weight in the New Republic. As head of the rebel alliance, she’s basically what they’d call a government-funded terrorist.’

Rey narrows her eyes at him. ‘How do I know _you_ didn’t come up with this plan? Isn’t Moraband where you were trying to take me when Finn cut you down?’

‘You can corroborate it with your master if you really want,’ Kylo replies smoothly, ‘considering we’re meeting him in five minutes in the hangar anyway.’

‘We’re leaving _now_?!’ she cries, stricken. ‘But we’ve only been here three days!’

Kylo’s nostrils flare, a sign of the frustration he barely keeps in check. ‘Two days was enough time to get you nearly turned into a sex slave at the hands of Hux, and me nearly burned alive. We aren’t safe here.’

‘And Luke thinks we’ll be safer on Moraband?’ she retorts. ‘At your base? Talk about out of the frying pan and into the bleeding fire!’

Kylo groaned in exasperation. ‘Why do you _always_ have to argue so much? And I have no idea what you’re referencing. Just get your shit, meet me back here and come to the hangar bay, Skywalker’s waiting for us.’

Rey stomps out of his room and back to her own, in foul spirits as she grabs her saberstaff and a spare flightsuit, assuming she’ll be the one piloting their vessel on this stupid trip to Sith Central. Of course the spoiled little prince can’t _fly_ , despite being the son of the best pilot in the galaxy, she thinks nastily as she makes her way back to his room. For someone who claims to be so powerful and independent, he certainly uses her like a damned chauffer ninety percent of the time.

‘Fly me to Moraband, Rey. Come to my room, Rey. Escort me around everywhere so I don’t get murdered by angry rebels, Rey,’ she mumbles, mimicking his low baritone.

She does escort him through the complex, and when they walk into the hangar, they find Luke Skywalker and his sister. Leia looks regal in a dress the colour of the night sky, her hair twisted into an elaborate braid, her brown eyes shining with moisture as she looks at Rey and Kylo. As her son approaches, she reaches out and takes him by the wrist, gripping it hard enough to bruise.

‘Remember what we talked about. Be good.’

‘I’m not a two-year-old, Mother,’ Kylo replies, but doesn’t yank his arm out of her grasp. _And I haven’t been good in fifteen years_ , he adds, but internally, so only Rey can hear. She smiles at the tinge of dark humour.

Leia lets go of his wrist and turns to hug Rey. ‘I didn’t want to let you go, but Luke has convinced me it’s the best course of action. And considering the implications for war if you stay, it might be best. Wherever you go - stay safe, won’t you?’

Rey hugs the general back, hard. ‘I promise.’ Obviously, Luke hasn’t told her where they plan to go; she would never have agreed. She shoots the Jedi a look over Leia’s shoulder, communicating with her eyes, and he inclines his head, confirming what Kylo has already told her.

Ren hangs back as Rey embraces her master, promising to meet with him soon to practice the saber Forms, and then Luke leads them to a small, heavily modified Corellian corvette starship, the ramp already lowered and the engines already powered up, from what Rey can tell. She gives the Jedi one last loaded look, and they disappear inside the ship, Rey heading straight for the cockpit, Kylo to the seating area to amuse himself while she flies.

 --

As Rey programs the controls, Kylo can’t help glancing out the window of the corvette. His mother is staring up at the ship, tears streaking her cheeks. He feels his stomach drop at the sight, and pinches his arm to get ahold of himself. It’s stupid to react to his mother’s emotions, or to anyone’s. He’s _supposed_ to be impermeable to this.

He turns away from the window – and blinks in shock.

On the table in the centre of the seating area are his two most prized possessions. His helmet, slightly dusty, and his lightsaber. Leia has arranged them there for him to find.

He sits down heavily at the table, running his fingers over the dome of the helmet, pushing on the familiar grooves and dents. He picks up his lightsaber and presses the switch, the roar of the blade a requiem for his past self, an identity he can never get back. And he realizes that in killing Hux, in deserting Snoke - he had effectively killed himself. The First Order would no longer recognise Kylo Ren. _He_ doesn’t even recognise him.

He takes the beam of the saber to the table, cleaving it in two.


	27. Makashi, Soresu and Ataru

Since they’re both Outer Rim systems, the distance between Lothal and Moraband isn’t more than two hyperspace jumps and a short stretch of interplanetary travel. But for Rey it feels like a contained eternity, stuck in close quarters with Kylo Ren _again_ , troubled by the new understanding between them. His warped declaration of love that she can’t excise from her mind; his oppressive darkness she feels every time he passes by the cockpit. She finds herself counting the minutes, tensing every time his mind rubs up against hers, accidentally or on purpose.

They’re just beginning to skate past Ithor’s gravitational pull when Ren speaks behind her, making her jump in the pilot’s chair.

‘Do you know much about Moraband, Rey?’

‘Gods!’ she gasps, spinning round to meet him. ‘You shouldn’t sneak up on people! I could have crashed the shuttle!’

‘It’s the origin of the Sith Order. Supreme Leader once called it the birthplace of Original Sin.’ Kylo keeps talking as if he hadn’t just scared the daylights out of her, staring out of the cockpit’s screen at the stellate fields before them. His eyes reflect the constellations, she notices, and she quickly looks away. ‘Of course, now that the real Sith are extinct, it’s also a necropolis. There are crypts there, in the Valley of the Dark Lords, and it’s said that the tomb of Darth Bane is at the centre. He was the last true Sith, and one of the most glorious.’

‘You talk about the Sith as if they were sacred,’ Rey says, dismayed, ‘as if they weren’t abominations that sold their souls to the Dark.’

Kylo gazes at her, unmoved. ‘It’s what I’ve trained for fifteen years to become. To me, they are sacred.’

‘Then you’re just as bad,’ she snaps. ‘But I already knew that. You ‘ _are the Dark Side’_ , and all that jazz. Now if you don’t mind, I have a ship to steer.’ She rolls back to face the front, ignoring him as he probes at her mind. It’s moments like these, when he skims over her mind through their indomitable link, that she really regrets saving his life. The bond is too strong for either of them to keep eachother out without a supreme feat of strength, and she doesn’t have it in her today. She’s stressed, hungry and disheartened. She realizes she hadn’t even had the opportunity to say goodbye to Poe and Finn, the closest thing she had to family, and who knows when circumstance will throw them together again?

A solitary tear slips down her cheek and plops onto the control panel. She wipes it away, hoping Ren didn’t see.

‘Hey.’

Shit. She stays resolutely facing the controls, hunching her shoulders protectively. ‘ _What_?’

He hesitates for a second. Then, ‘D’you still want to learn the saber Forms?’

Slowly, the pilot’s chair revolves around. Rey searches his face for any sign of treachery, and finds none. ‘Why? Do _you_ want to teach me?’

Kylo runs a hand through his hair. ‘Skywalker’s not here to do it, is he? He actually asked me to teach you the ways of the Light. I won’t do that, but I might be willing to compromise with the saber Forms.’

Rey sniffs dubiously, but he’s right: Luke isn’t here to teach her, and most likely won’t be for the foreseeable future. And how amazing would it be to be proficient in all seven Forms by the next time she sees him?

Kylo’s lips twitch, hearing her thoughts. ‘It’s no easy task to learn all seven Forms, Rey. You’ll find that some come more naturally to you than others. But if you let me be your teacher, we’ll start with _Makashi, Soresu and Ataru_. You already know how to use _Shii-Cho_ – you did so, very ineffectually, on Starkiller.’

‘Ineffectually?’ She flicks her eyes deliberately to the crooked scar on his face. ‘What do you call that then, a literal stroke of luck?’

He lets the barb slide, though Rey can feel that it eats at him. ‘Come on. The ship can steer itself for an hour.’

It’s true: the Corvette has a decent autopilot system, and she’d charted its course up to Yavin, which is another hour and a half away. After that, she’ll need to steer through a couple of debris disks and avoid a black hole, but they’re in stasis for the moment. And so she accepts the offer. Begrudgingly.

 --

‘I don’t think there are any training sabers on this ship,’ she comments, making a show of searching the command deck’s storage cabinet.

He fires up his demonic red saber in response, the thunderous noise of it seeming to come straight from her darkest dreams.

‘You want to be a true Jedi?’ Kylo asks, beginning to circle her.

‘Yes,’ she says firmly, gulping a little as he orbits, dark eyes trained on her.

‘Then you know that according to your creed, there is no death, but the Force. A true Jedi is always staring death in the face. So we’ll spar with real sabers, or not at all.’

Rey swallows the upwelling of post-traumatic fear, and thumbs her saberstaff to life, the rush of dark pink light comforting her, reminding her that she’s just as capable as he, if not more so. She twirls the saber and points one of the ends toward him. He does the same – their version of a respectful handshake.

‘Let’s see how much you know.’

And he’s on her in a split second, attacking savagely, lightsaber cutting the air to ribbons and red sparks bursting in her vision as she brings her staff up to meet his. His strikes are so energetic, so vicious that she stumbles backwards, finding it hard to block or anticipate his frenetic movements.

‘ _What form am I using_?’ he yells over the buzzing of their weapons, throwing every iota of force behind a strike that almost smacks the hilt of her staff out of her hand. She shakes her arm, readjusting her grip as he moves into a full-on assault, hitting her staff with a barrage of deadly blows, too fast and furious for her to get a swing in.

‘ _Ataru_!’ she shouts back as their sabers lock, spitting angry sparks. Ren shoves her violently with his shoulder, knocking her to the floor of the shuttle. She just manages to spin her staff upwards to block his next strike, and avoids damaging the floor with the plasma beam.

‘What’s the flaw in this technique?’ he prods, bearing down on her staff, the tip of his fiery blade inching closer to her unprotected neck as their sabers slide over eachother.

She murmurs something, and pushes back feebly against his saber, trying to wriggle away from the blazing point.

‘What was that?’ Kylo taunts her, beginning to close the distance between saber and skin.

‘I said, it leaves you exposed to counterattacks,’ Rey snarls, and she swats the light-beam aside as if it’s nothing but air, somersaulting out of the way as Kylo swings his blade at the space her head had been. She leaps to her feet with feline grace, and cuts at him with the staff, grazing the edge of his cloak as he darts out of the way.

‘I’d hardly call that a counterattack, but keep trying,’ he jeers as he stabs at her wrap, singeing the fabric. He languidly parries her next move, swirling his blade until one of the crossguards meets her saber-hilt, wedging her beam between the quillon and the main blade so that she can’t dislodge it without turning her weapon off. ‘The main problem with Ataru is that it expends a lot of energy; you get tired too easily, lose the ferocity you had.’

‘All right. Show me another one.’

Kylo switches off the saber, extricating it from hers. He brushed a stray curl out of his eyes and adjusted his footing, ‘It would be easier to demonstrate this one with a blaster. Center yourself in the Force, Rey – you will need heightened senses for this.’

She does as he instructs, calming herself and visualizing her place in the net of energy. She keeps her eyes closed as she hears Kylo’s lightsaber roar to life again, and feels his slow, measured footsteps as he pads towards her. She somehow knows, innately; when he’ll strike, and she lifts her staff up to ward his off. She blocks him again and again, deflecting his swipes at lightning speed and foreseeing his movements, mirroring his steps around the room while sightless.

‘This is the third form, _Soresu_. You used it on Takodana when I was shooting at you,’ she muses, as they step in tandem.

‘Yes. You don’t have to close your eyes for it, though, you know.’

‘I see the Force better this way.’

‘That’s something you need to train yourself out of. I could have easily killed you when you shut your eyes during our first battle – you left your entire flank unguarded.’

‘Keep telling yourself that,’ she smirks, and he growls.

‘Enough of this one. It’s pointless without a blaster. We’ll move onto _Makashi_.’

‘Excellent.’ Rey opens her eyes, switching up her grip on the staff as Kylo advances on her again, tracking her across the room like an apex predator. ‘What has Skywalker told you about the second form?’ he fires the question at her.

‘Uh… it was the first form developed for when the Jedi started fighting the Sith,’ she remembers, shuffling her feet to get into defensive position.

‘And why is that?’ Kylo prompts, brandishing his red beam at her chest.

‘Because they were the only other adversaries that had lightsabers,’ Rey answers, bringing her saberstaff up to eye level, peering at him through the haze of light. ‘It’s all about precision, elegance and stopping yourself from being disarmed.’

‘Because the Jedi were too chickenshit to risk combat without lightsabers,’ Kylo grins, and he charges again, hammering at her saber with a series of one-handed strikes, his face screwed up with concentration, black hair obscuring his eyes.

Rey reaches under his arm to try a jab at his ribs. ‘That makes zero sense.’

He bends his saber under his arm with one hand, meeting hers as it almost makes contact with his skin. Their blades crackle and fizz at the meeting, and he forces hers high into the air, grabbing her wrist with his free hand.

‘It does make sense,’ he pants, his eyes dancing; more animated than she’s ever seen him. ‘Discarding our weapons, fighting on another dimensional plane with just the Force, makes us more like gods than warriors. Anyone can use a lightsaber, your friend Finn proved that. You and I are special.’

‘You’re delusional, that’s what you are,’ Rey spits, struggling in his grip. ‘We aren’t bloody _gods_ just because we can use the Force. We’re still human - we hurt, we bleed, we _die_.’

‘ _There is no death; there is the Force_ ,’ he quotes again, tightening his grasp on her wrist and switching off his lightsaber, leaving her with just her saberstaff burning overhead. ‘No Force-sensitive ever really dies. Where we’re going, you’ll find that out for yourself. We’re practically immortal.’

‘It didn’t seem that way when you were bleeding out in the med-bay of the Falcon,’ she huffs, turning off Darkheart in midair, her wrist still in his grip. ‘I thought we were meant to be practicing the Forms, not talking about being young gods.’

‘I got carried away,’ he shrugs. ‘Forgive me. But we’ve practiced three of the Forms today. We won’t have time for all seven.’

‘Okay.’ She eyes him shiftily. ‘You’re still holding my arm.’

‘Oh, I know.’ He smirks, not loosening his grip.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What _am_ I doing?’ he parrots, arching an eyebrow, his dark eyes glinting with mischief. His lips are frighteningly close to hers by now, all it takes is one more centimetre and they’d be touching.

‘It’s a little unwise to ask me what I’d like to do to you, Rey,’ he murmurs, his eyes tracking over her form, settling on her chest, which is rapidly flushing peony.

The bond between them is singing, a siren song of lust and longing, and the urge to give in to him becomes paralyzing. Her nipples harden underneath her wrap, her chest tightens and she wriggles uncomfortably as the space between her thighs grows wet, craving friction. At that moment, he could have spread her legs wide, bent her over the captain’s bench and fucked her like the hateful beast he was, and she would have let him. She would have enjoyed it.

But her eyes light on the scar she’d given him, that memento of their first battle. And the siren song is gone.

‘Ren. _Let. Me. Go_.’ Rey commands in a voice like gravel, and he waits a few seconds before releasing her wrist, smiling like he’d read every obscene thought that had drifted through her mind, and he probably – no, definitely – had.

She hurries back to the cockpit to oversee their journey past Yavin, and when she slumps down into the pilot’s chair, she clenches her trembling thighs together, hyperventilating, trying to cool the hot flush of her arousal. She puts her burning head in her hands, mortified. _What’s happening to me?_

\-- 

A twinkling golden cloud of ionized dust drifts past the viewport, and Rey groans as she rolls over on the little cot. Sleep just isn’t coming tonight, and she knows perfectly well why. Since she’d retired to the crew cabin, her every thought has been plagued by Kylo’s words or face – and now it’s past one in the morning, and any chance she’d had of getting sleep is shot to shit.

She’s too hyped up from the energetic sparring, or the electric flirtation, or a combination of both. Thinking about his eyes, dark with lust and danger, and the wistful song of their connection, brings spots of colour to her cheekbones and that damnable hot flush between her legs again. She squirms, pressing her thighs together under the bedcovers, tortured by the sudden, inexplicable need for human contact; for calloused hands and hard kisses and – _no_. There was no way in the deepest circles of hell that she’d stoop so low as to do _that_. But there _is_ something she can do – improve upon the reality of that dreadful man, twist it so that it no longer disgusted her to fantasize about this, about _him_.

She kicks off the sheets and peels her flight suit away from sticky, overheated skin: fingers skating over the sharp edges of her collarbones, playing their way down to the swells of her breasts. She runs her hands over her ribcage, cataloguing the bones as if they don’t belong to her, as if her hands are not hers at all, but _his_. She breathes deeply; reminding herself that this wouldn’t be the first time she’d imagined him, or others. She’d learned how to please herself before she’d even begun to bleed.

She slides a hand lower, into her underwear: fingers tickling the fine, downy pubic hairs before a single finger slips between the lips, brushing her clit, and she can’t suppress a sigh at the immediate _pulse_ of relief she feels, her neglected parts cooling as she begins to rub in controlled little circles on her sensitive spot, sending tingles through her legs and toes, curling them unnaturally as she starts to climb. And all the while, she fuels herself on fantasy images of detailed hands and black curls caressing her face, him kissing her into the pillows, his body rocking into hers – in this alternate reality, there’s no shame, no death tally, no blood on his conscience.

Halfway through, she feels Ren’s awakening through the link and knows that he can hear, see and feel what’s happening. And frankly, she doesn’t give a damn. _Let him lose sleep, too_. Her fingers begin to work harder, blood pooling in erogenous zones as she writhes and gasps, her hand deep in her underwear, feeling the prickling of his eyes on her.

Oddly, that only increases the eroticism, and she evilly begins to project her stream of images his way – flooding the link with dirty thoughts of him taking her roughly enough to leave hand-shaped bruises, biting her neck like ripe fruit as he spills his seed deep inside her – and she faintly feels his shocked response as she ascends higher and higher, not caring about the sinfulness of this act, focusing on her touch and her rattling breaths as her muscles lock and her toes spasm and she comes apart in the little cot, toppling over the edge of her consciousness and into the senseless, blank ecstasy of her climax. The link shorts out as her mind crests wave after wave, and all she can see is that sparkling golden nebula outside, expanding into a galaxy of pure bliss.

She floats back to herself in time to feel Kylo’s deepening arousal, his swirling anger as she _groans_ , murmuring something that could have been either _Ben_ or _Ren_ , her legs cramping deliciously as she stills her frantic movements.

She reaches toward her sense of him through the bond, asking unkindly, _Did you get all that?_

For a long time, there’s utter silence on his end. Then his breathless response. _Yes_.

She stretches out an arm and finds the bedcovers in the dark, not bothering to dress again as she pulls the sheets back over her nakedness. _Goodnight._

And she falls headlong into a dreamless sleep, leaving the First Knight with blue balls and a mouthful of unspoken obscenities.

 

 

 

_______________________________

**Sources for this chapter:**

[Saber Forms](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lightsaber_combat) (or just go and read Trebia's 'Forms' - it's a hell of a lot more beautiful and interesting than a wiki article)


	28. Young Gods

Rey pulls the Corellian corvette out of the second hyperdrive channel, riding it through a Mandalorian meteor shower, wincing every time a small chunk of debris hits the reinforced walls.

Kylo runs into the cockpit as the rocks rain down, making an awful racket as they roll off the sides of the corvette. She steadfastly avoids eye contact – as much as she’d enjoyed teasing him last night, there’s no denying that it had been a mistake, kicking the hornet’s nest like that. Sometimes it’s incredibly easy to forget what an dangerous, emotionally unstable person Kylo Ren is – he’s been so refreshingly _real_ , so imperfect these last few weeks, compared to the dark disciple she used to think of him as – it’s hard to be afraid of a monster when they don’t act like one.

‘What’s happening?’ he asks, his black hair disheveled and sticking up as though he’s just been dragged backwards through a Lothalian bush. By the look of him, he’s just woken up after last night’s little incident.

‘It’s a meteor shower. There’s an asteroid belt near Mandalore, so there was bound to be rubble. No big deal.’

Kylo’s eyes pop. ‘Not a big deal? Hitting an asteroid was what crash-landed me on Felucia. I’d rather we had a mode of transport to get _off_ Moraband again in case things go pear-shaped.’

‘Calm down, crybaby. And nobody’s even bothered to tell me what _things_ we’re doing on Moraband – _what_ could go pear-shaped? What’s your plan?’

Kylo doesn’t answer for a long time, staring out the window at the neutron stars and white dwarfs outside their spaceship. Just when Rey thinks he’s ignored her question entirely, he speaks. ‘Your master wishes me to complete my training.’

Rey snorts, adjusting their course to evade a magnetar she picked up on her last screen. ‘You’re becoming a Jedi? Wow. Out of everything, I never expected that.’

‘Not training with _him_ ,’ Kylo snaps, taking the bait she’d dangled before him. ’Snoke’s training. What I’ve been striving for for the last fifteen years.’

‘So _that’s_ why you were being so rhapsodic about the Sith earlier,’ Rey says disgustedly. ‘You’re becoming one of them. Although given the way your Order treats traitors, I don’t know how you expect him to train you again.’

‘He won’t be,’ Kylo says quietly. ‘Skywalker suggested I go to the archives of the Sith, and learn from them. There’s nothing Snoke could teach me that wouldn’t already be there.’

‘Terrific!’ Rey throws her hands up. ‘And I’ve been brought along on this mission to help you turn to the Dark side, have I?’

‘The Dark side is my destiny, Rey,’ he declares, his tone so self-important she wants to punch his teeth out.

‘Only as much as mine is the Light,’ she retorts, glaring at him. ‘So what happens when you turn, then? When you become a Sith Lord, will you try to destroy me? Will I have to kill you? Because I can turn this ship around, right now, and fly us literally _anywhere else_ in the galaxy. I’m not going to be a part of your goddamn murder-suicide or whatever the hell this is.’

‘If all goes well, it’ll just be the murder part,’ he says coolly, watching for her reaction. ‘Your precious master was the one who suggested it. He wants me to kill _my_ master, so that I can take his place.’

Rey’s mouth falls open. She’s speechless, trying to process what he’d just told her so nonchalantly. _So… we’re here to kill Snoke?_

Kylo nods. ‘He’s not a Sith, and when I have finished training and studying their ways, I will be stronger than him. He’s kept me weak and dependent for years to prevent that day from coming. But my powers are getting stronger – and I think it’s because of the bond, Rey.’

He pulls up a chair and sits down next to her in the cockpit, his eyes searching her face. ‘What Skywalker talked about – it’s happening. The sharing of power, blending into eachother. When I came to rescue you from Hux, I was able to use the Force in ways I’d never attempted before. It was like I’d suddenly tapped into a wellspring of the Force in the link between us, and the closer I got to you, the stronger the power. I forged a fucking _Darkshear_ to kill the general. That’s no coincidence-‘

‘What is a Darkshear?’ Rey interrupts, her forehead crinkling in befuddlement.

‘It’s a spear of midnight black, an extremely potent Force power that only few people have summoned throughout history. Like you and your lightning,’ he adds as an afterthought.

They’re both quiet for a time, his face turned towards hers expectantly. She doesn’t speak.

‘I used to think that Snoke would make me godlike when I absorbed his power,’ Kylo murmurs, half to himself. ‘The Rule of Two states that the apprentice must struggle for every achievement under his master, and when there is nothing left to learn, he will overthrow him and consume the master’s Force energy, taking it into himself. But now… I think, together, we are already divine.’ He looks up at her, eyes gleaming with ardor.

‘Will you stop harping on about gods and divinity!’ Rey spits vehemently, spinning to face him in the pilot’s seat. ‘You’re not a damn god; you’re just a man with some serious delusions of grandeur!’

‘Am I, though?’ he asks. ‘Isn’t it true that Revan was deified for being what he was: the heart of the Force? You and I represent that just as much as he did. Your lightning, my Darkshear; your calm, my storm; your light, my darkness. We equalize eachother, Rey, and I don’t think it’s just because of the Force bond. We’re the same as when we met, only twice as powerful.’

‘So what are you _saying_?’ she asks him urgently, desperate for an answer to end all the confusion, the opposing thoughts clamoring for attention inside her mind. ‘Goddammit, Ben, what do you _mean_?’

‘I – I think that we must have been destined to meet. That the Force created the hundreds of little coincidences it would take to throw us back together on Takodana. Because there’s no way that saving my life could have led to something this – this –‘ he stumbles through his syntax for the right word, ‘ -all-encompassing.’

‘Destiny? You’re bringing _destiny_ into this?’ Rey laughs derisively. ‘Don’t tell me my stupid actions last night brought on this madness. A moment ago you were assuring me that the Dark side was your destiny.’

‘And it is, but not in the way that you think,’ he snaps, frustrated at his inability to just _explain_ his thought process to her. ‘Listen, we’re nearly on Moraband. Let me take you to the catacombs – maybe you’ll understand then.’

‘I don’t have a choice in the matter, it seems,’ she sniffs, but she turns back to the controls, dropping the confrontational stance. He sighs.

But then Rey stiffens again, her back ramrod straight in her sudden realization.

‘You said _back_ together.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he replies swiftly, but Rey isn’t buying it. She swivels around, her hazel eyes lasering him.

‘You did. How could the Force throw us _back_ together, Ren? The first time I met you was on Takodana.’

‘I misspoke. It happens more frequently than I’d like.’

‘I’m sure that’s true. But not this time. I can sense your emotions, remember? And you’re scared shitless now.’ She leans forward in the seat, more menacing than he’s ever seen her, and that included when she’d lashed out and burned his face with his grandfather’s lightsaber.

‘What are you hiding from me, Ben Solo? You know something about me, don’t you? From when I was young? Oh God, do you know who my _parents_ are? Who are they? _Who am I?_ ’ Her voice rises to a shrill, plaintive cry that hurts his ears and heart.

‘Rey, calm down – Rey!’ he grabs her shoulders and brings his forehead to hers, trying to slow her frantic thoughts. He sends his own directly to her through the link: _I don’t know everything, but I will tell you what I do. I promise. Just get us safely onto Moraband first._

‘Okay?’ he asks aloud, feeling her temper cool, hardening into something dispassionate, tough and more like her normal self.

_Okay. But I’m not helping you become a Sith or fight Snoke or do **anything else** until you tell me._

He releases the breath he’d been holding, and without stopping to think about it, kisses her cheek. _Thank you._

‘Don’t do that,’ she mutters, too shellshocked to properly tell him off.

He leaves the cockpit, thinking to himself that he liked the feisty Rey of last night better than this timid, stunned creature. But if any place were going to test her spirit, it would be Moraband. Their first challenge would be to sneak past the satellites and scanners the First Order had no doubt erected on the planet, and after that, they’d need to make it into the Valley of the Dark Lords unnoticed, to find the archives of the Sith teachings that were kept under lock and key.

Nothing would be easy. But then again, nothing ever is with her. His thoughts return to their feedback loop, playing through the filthy scenes again – better than any of the Force dreams they’d shared, because this time she’d actively shared her thoughts with him, pictured him doing those indecent things to her.

He walks back to the seating area, toying with the helmet he’d left on the table. He jams it over his head, smiling a little as it clicks into place.

 --

It had been a long and uncomfortable sojourn, but now that Moraband is in range, Rey wishes they could just keep flying through space forever, in the chrysalis of their spaceship. Here, amongst the stars, they’re safer than they could ever be when on a planet – Snoke can’t get them here, the First Order can’t trace them when they’re in constant flux.

She begins to program the controls for their descent, the red auroras surrounding Moraband shifting ominously as they’re sucked into the planet’s gravity. They speed through the thermosphere, the walls rattling again as she eases off on the thrusters, hoping against hope that whoever is monitoring entry and exits on this planet is asleep at their desk. She can feel Ren’s anxiety blending with her own as the blur of red sharpens into a patchwork of rolling, russet sand dunes and the jagged peaks of mountains topped with yellow sulphur. The entire planet looks poisonous, she thinks - there are no trees in sight, no clean air. Just the depressing red sand. God, she’s sick of the sight of sand.

‘It was said that Darth Vader hated sand too,’ Kylo Ren’s mask-modified voice pipes up from the corner of the room, startling her. ‘He grew up on a desert planet, Tatooine, very similar to Jakku.’

‘Wow,’ Rey deadpans. ‘Thank you for that pearl of wisdom, Kylo. I see you got that grotesque mask back. It doesn’t suit you.’

‘Try not to land directly on the patrol tower, won’t you?’ he needles her as they fly over a dust-stained complex in the ditch between two tall dunes. She grits her teeth and raises the ship a few metres, checking again that their cloaking mechanisms are working as they pass a satellite.

‘Where do you suggest we land, then, smartass?’

‘If memory serves, the entrance to the Valley of the Dark Lords is set in the foothills. So fly over the mountains and I’ll try to sense it. It only opens for Force users anyway.’

Rey shakes her head in disbelief, but does as he asks. Kylo closes his eyes underneath the mask, white-knuckling the back of her chair as he tries to sense their destination. After a long minute of circling like a carrion bird, he taps her shoulder. ‘Land here.’

She obliges, maneuvring the corvette down onto a stable sandbank, and follows Kylo Ren down the lowered ramp, shaking the stiffness out of her back and shoulders. The dust devils she’d seen from above immediately invade her eyes and mouth, choking her and itching at the membranes of her nose. The air smells vile, like the exhaust given off by the broken pipes of starships. She holds her nose as they advance past tiny tornadoes of red sand, heading for a stone obelisk that pokes out of the side of the nearest mountain ridge.

‘Surely the Sith Lords of old wouldn’t make their resting place so obvious?’ she calls after Kylo, who’s bent down to inspect the monument.

‘They haven’t,’ he says grimly, and as she draws closer, she sees what he meant. The pillar is engraved with letters in a language she’s never seen in any holobook – the letters are stretched into thin lines, littered with little symbols and arrows, completely archaic.

‘D’you… do you know this language?’ she mutters to Ren, who’s staring at the symbols with a look of intense concentration.

‘It’s the Old Tongue, the ancient language of the Sith. I can’t translate much of it, but I recognize a few words.’

‘What does it say?’ Rey asks eagerly.

‘Speak the Rule.’

She scoffs at that. ‘I was hoping for something more original.’

‘It’s original enough,’ he snaps, affronted. ‘Let’s see _you_ translate it.’

‘I’ll pass, thanks.’

Kylo reaches out and touches the point of the buried obelisk with his glove. He closes his eyes, remembering the phrase he’d memorized once, many years ago. The Rule of Two is central to the Last Sith, to Darth Bane’s ideology.

_“Two there should be, no more, no less. One to embody power, the other to crave it’.”_

To Rey’s ears, the voice-changer makes the phrase sound like a croon. And then there’s the grating sound of moving stone, and a clot of earth falls out of the side of the mountain, creating a ragged hole, complete with severed roots and tubers hanging like entrails, earwigs scuttling out the mouth of the tunnel.

‘What _is_ it with us and caves?’ Rey cracks. Kylo turns his masked face to her, staring her down in disapproving silence. Even after all this time, the dreadful mask still gives her an adrenaline boost. It always will.

And so, abandoning all overtures, she climbs into the tunnel after him and starts to crawl.

 


	29. Chasing Ghosts

As a professional scavenger, Rey is accustomed to crawling on hands and knees through cramped spaces – wriggling through the tiny gaps in the bones of starships had been part of her daily routine. But this tunnel is different. The deeper they crawled, the stronger the Dark grows around them, heavy and thick as treacle, stifling her until she feels like she’s being smothered in black gauze, dark sheets cutting off her air supply. She can’t see her hand in front of her face, and she chokes on panicked bile. To distract herself, she calls out to Kylo, who was shuffling somewhere in front of her. ‘What does that password mean?’

‘What? Oh. It was Bane’s decree on the Rule of Two,’ his disembodied voice replies, annoyingly vague.

Rey shivers a little in the clammy blackness, thinking of the implications of that rule, and Luke’s harebrained scheme to kill the Supreme Leader. Could it really be done? She’d felt the immensity of his power when he’d squeezed himself inside her head – he is ancient, but all that means is that he’s had extra time to develop his colossal mastery of the Dark side. Can Ren really come up against him in a straight fight and win, even with the added strength of their Force bond?

‘Hey, Kylo?’ she starts, ready to question him about it.

There’s no answer but the scuffle of her feet in the dirt.

Rey stops crawling, and the silence settles around her like a funeral shroud. ‘Kylo?’

The tunnel walls swallowed her words, not even an echo bouncing back to her.

 _Ben_! She shouts inside her head, scouring their link for his presence. His signature is absent in the net of the Force, which is pixelated and out of focus as she accesses it, like a badly wired comm-link.

She hears a coarse scraping noise in the distance and freezes, every nerve running hot, and it takes every ounce of courage she has not to turn tail and crawl back out of the tunnel. Terrified, she scrambles forward – and the solid, hard-packed earth beneath her hands and knees suddenly gives way. She tumbles out of the tunnel, expecting to fall forever but landing hard on a floor of cobblestones. She lies there, winded, the shock of the drop travelling up her spine and ricocheting through her cerebrum.

\--

When she can breathe again, Rey clambers to her feet, and as she brushes herself off, her fingers touch upon the hilt of her saberstaff. _Light_! She draws it from her sash and switches it on, mauve light flooding the dim chamber she stands in, the walls glimmering dully as the beams pass over something white. _Bone_.

The walls are decorated with skulls – both human and alien, spurred and smooth, embedded in the structure of the wall. She bites back a scream as she moves the light of her saberstaff to illuminate the floor and realizes that what she’d landed on hadn’t been stones, but more skulls, buried to the teeth, empty eye sockets glinting up at her. She’s no stranger to skeletons – there had been a few unfortunate souls inside wrecked AT-ATs and dreadnoughts over the years in the junkyard. But this is a mausoleum for hundreds of bones, glowing phosphorescent in the pink light.

She can’t take it. She runs back to where she’d fallen out of the tunnel, running her free hand over the walls, recoiling from each bone she touches. But there’s no opening – the tunnel has caved in, or disappeared, or maybe it had never been there. And she’s been buried alive, left to rot in this sepulchre with a thousand other corpses.

The scraping, dragging sounds start again, and Rey bites her knuckles hard enough to split the skin. The noises reverberate endlessly off the walls of the crypt – it’s impossible to tell whether the source is coming towards her or moving away.

She holds her saberstaff like a torch in front of her face, squinting through the haze of pink light at the shadows twisting at the edges of the room. The walls don’t quite line up at one corner, they overlap – there’s a crawlspace! She crouches, powering down her saber to slither through the gap.

She reignites it as she stands, her peripheral vision immediately picking out the differences in this room – burnt-out sconces on the walls instead of skulls, dirt under her feet, footprints and skid-marks stamped into the soil. The source of the scraping? Her lungs cramp up as she follows the trails down a second, larger tunnel, her body threatening to shut down from the constant stress. She pushes on, for Kylo’s sake if not her own – where the hell is he? He’d been directly in front of her only minutes ago.

She drives herself onward, holding Darkheart aloft, the beam almost touching the dirt ceiling – and there’s a flash of white at the end of the tunnel, a sharp fork of lightning shooting across her vision, leaving a burning trajectory on her retinas. She blinks the flare away and breaks into a clumsy jog, keeping her thumb on the button of her saber as the tunnel opens into another room: the ceiling arching upward until it’s too high to see clearly, the walls becoming slick black granite. In front of her is a series of steps leading up to a raised marble coffin, traced with cyphers in the same language Kylo had read from the pillar outside. A tomb.

And as another lance of lightning cleaves the air around her, ringing in her ears and shaking the ground, Rey notices that the coffin’s lid is open, the embalmed corpse inside it moving restlessly, starting to pull itself into a sitting position. The sockets of plucked-out eyes turn in her direction, imperial dressings sloughing like skin off the bones of the carcass that stands up in its casket, raising a rotten finger to point at her.

The putrid reek of decay hangs in the air, as she stands, motionless. The nightmarish creature staggers towards her on legs that are crumbling to ash. Rey screams, and it raises its hand again, the rotten smell choking her –

A lightsaber, not her own, cuts through the air, reducing the cadaver to a whirlwind of bone-dust. Rey cries out, whirling round and raising her saberstaff to meet the masked assailant’s –

And she senses that it’s _Kylo_. It’s Kylo, but so much _less_. His lightsaber is black as death rather than red; burning smoothly when it should be sputtering. He’s wearing his surcoat with the hood pulled up, but as she adjusts the tilt of her staff, its pink light falls on his face as another horrified scream echoes around the crypt, taking a few seconds for Rey to realize the cry is coming from her.

Ren is older, taller - and half his face is missing. Instead of skin, his black hair falls over the silver metal of restructured bone, animatronic enhancements that click together as he leers at her. One of his eyes is cybernetic, the other inflamed and yellow as the sulphur on the mountains outside. What remains of his original face still bears the scar she’d given him, along with countless others.

The hand that isn’t holding his dark saber is robotic, too, and she lets out a small sob as it flexes, jointed fingers touching her face, her lips, curling around her chin and jerking it up to meet his mad, golden eyes.

‘ _Look what you made me do_ ,’ he whispers to her, smiling slightly. And he grabs her by the throat, bending her round until her neck almost snaps – and suddenly they’re standing on a precipice, looking down from a dizzying height as stars shatter and planets tremble, entire systems exploding, becoming fireballs.

‘ _You could never look past the monster inside, so that’s what I became_ ,’ he coos into her ear, mechanical fingers toying with her hair as they sway atop the peak of the galaxy, watching the constellations burst, billions of lights and lives extinguished in the blink of an eye. ‘ _I went to Snoke and begged his forgiveness. He merged his soul with mine, and we were more than gods; we were cataclysmic. We were the End. And so now, as the universe burns, it’s just us left. Finally alone.’_

He tips her face up to his and kisses her ravenously, his lips the only unchanged part of him, reminding her of her dreams. She beats her fists against his chests, feebly trying to push him off, tears coursing down her cheeks.

He pulls back, his violent yellow eyes penetrating her to the core. ‘ _You still refuse me? **Still**?’ _ His mouth distorts into an ugly smile. ‘ _Have it your way, then.’_

And he pushes her off the edge of the cliff, into the chaos of the dying galaxies. She catches alight, the flames consuming her as she falls forever.

 --

Rey has vanished, the tunnel has collapsed, and claustrophobia is setting in with a vengeance. Kylo bites his tongue hard enough to taste blood as he walks past the ossuary of bones, the flickering glow of his lightsaber revealing a small gap in the wall.

Quickly, he crawls through; unsure whether Rey is behind or ahead of him. He can hear an odd, rasping sound in the distance, and he follows it if only to escape the tiny, cramped space of the vault.

The Darkness here doesn’t frighten him; he feels at home in it. He can sense the spirits of the ageless Sith, their presence at once insidious and reassuring in the blackness of the crypts. He can almost touch the undercurrents of their power vibrating through the Force, tangible and awe-inspiring even from beyond the grave. And so he chases those ghosts, following his senses down a dark passageway, slowing his pace as the tunnel opens up into a large burial chamber; a coffin decorated with black marble and carvings in the Sith dialect. He ascends the stone steps and kneels before the sarcophagus, reading the letters that spell out the name of the greatest, and last, of the pure Sith lineage.

‘Darth Bane,’ he whispers, bowing his head in reverence. ‘There is no higher honour.’

Phantom fingers anoint the dome of his mask, and he turns away from the coffin, still kneeling as he looks up at the vision before him.

The Dark Lord Bane stands there, his spectral body glowing in patches, aflame in others, as though he is composed of cooling embers. He opens his maw, and two voices issue forth: one a harsh whisper, the other a throaty roar.

**_You kneel before my tomb, darkling, and I can sense the duality in you. I am Bane, last survivor of the Sith line, founder of the Rule of Two. I have sensed what you will become if you follow my teachings, young apprentice. Come. Let me show you._ **

The phantasm holds out a hand, and when Kylo takes it, it sears his palm through his glove, like a brand. The tomb of Darth Bane dissolves around him, the scene recrystallizing into a tableau from Starkiller Base: two uniformed figures genuflecting before a figure, seated on an enormous throne of black stone. _Snoke_? But the figure holds a lightsaber – _his_ lightsaber – and it’s him on the Supreme Leader’s throne, sovereign over the armies of the First Order.

This _other_ Kylo Ren is unmasked, his eyes pupilless and pure black, and he smiles callously down at his leading officers as he orders them to perform a raid on Lothal, to make sure the self-titled general Leia Organa will be brought before him alive, so that he can deal with her accordingly.

Darkness obscures his vision, and when he regains his sight, the other Kylo is sitting on a different throne: this one calcified, built from human bones. He’s perched on top of a sea of bloodied, maimed corpses, and as the real Kylo takes a closer look, he recognises the shells of his mother, his father, the rogue Stormtrooper, Chewbacca, among thousands of other nameless people.

The other Kylo is pouring jetfuel from an ornate goblet onto the corpses, laughing maniacally as he lights the fires that burn every corpse beneath his throne to char.

And as the real Kylo blinks, time blurring and reshaping itself before him, he hears Rey’s voice, the quiet footfalls signifying her approach. He opens his eyes, and she’s there, straight out of his fantasies and dressed in a black leather catsuit that clings to every curve like a second skin. She smiles, her eyes radiant with love as she gazes at him, the real Kylo. He removes his helmet, letting it drop into the dirt.

‘ _Come here, Ben_ ,’ she singsongs, opening her arms to welcome him. Kylo Ren walks into her embrace, hugging her tightly. She leaves a trail of soft-lipped kisses along his jawbone -

And ignites her saberstaff between their entwined bodies, the twin blades impaling them both.

 

 

 

_____________________________________

**Sources for this chapter:**

**[Darth Bane](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Bane/Canon) **


	30. Darkness Becomes Her

She’s breathing in the soil, clots of wet earth compacting her lungs. Rey wakes up, facedown in the dirt of the tunnel floor. She raises her head, wiping grit off her cheeks, completely disoriented as she stares around. Where is the tomb? Where is the coffin? Where is Kylo Ren? Had it all been an illusion?

She rolls onto her back, breathing heavily, trying to center herself in the present. _Okay_. So there had been no reanimated corpse, no cybernetic Kylo, no apocalypse. She hadn’t been burned alive, freefalling through deep space. _So what the everloving fu-_

Her train of thought is derailed by an earth-shattering scream, somewhere in the darkness to her left. _Kylo_.

She leaps to her feet, kicking herself in the ankle as she tries to hurry toward the yell. The link has bloomed again like an aster in her brain, and the temperamental grey of his Force signature is clearly visible as she zeroes in on it. She switches on her saberstaff, running through the passageway toward the familiar figure in his black cloak, bent over against the wall, gripped by a fit of tremors. As Rey runs up to him, her saberstaff still lit, he cringes away from her, his voice pleading, oddly childlike, inside her mind: _Don’t kill me!_

‘Kill - _what_?! I’m not going to kill you!’ Rey laughs, confused. She tries to touch his shoulder, but Kylo flinches away from her hand as though it’s a viper, and she realizes with shock that he’s _crying_ – tears pouring from his eyes and dripping down his elongated nose, his helmet discarded on the ground by his feet.

She powers down her saberstaff, standing awkwardly in front of Kylo Ren. She’s seen him cry before, the day he’d returned from the massacre on Felucia, but this is worse – he’s shaking like a leaf, traumatized by whatever visions had appeared to him. She is tempted to back away and leave him to cry here, isolated. But when she tries to turn away, she flashes back to Kylo rescuing her from General Hux; trusting her enough to follow her over a waterfall; sparring with her in the corvette, teaching her the Forms. Telling her in the kyber crystal caves that she’d made him love her, that she drove him insane.

 _Rescuing you doesn’t change the fact that he’s a bad person;_ Finn’s somber voice steals through her thoughts as Rey pulls Kylo to her and folds her arms around him, hugging him tightly as he quakes, his tears making a damp patch on her sleeve. _But bad people can still do good things,_ she argues with herself.

She runs her free hand through Kylo’s knotted hair, trying to soothe him. ‘I’m not going to kill you, Ben,’ she murmurs. ‘But I think – I think you have to kill Snoke, and I think I have to help you.’

He raises his head, his face blotchy and tear-stained. ‘What changed your mind?’

‘I’ve seen a vision of what you’ll become if you don’t. It’s really, really bad. Like, end-of-the-world bad if it were to come true.’ She sends a few snapshots through the link – the ruined cyborg face; the maddened, heartbroken eyes; the extinction of the universe.

Kylo gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing erratically in his throat. ‘I saw a vision too, of what I’ll become if I do kill him. It’s just as bad. So either way, I’m fucked.’

‘ _Shhhh_ ,’ Rey holds a finger up to his lips. ‘They’re just visions. We don’t know whether they’ll come to pass. The future isn’t set in stone. We can change it.’

‘Are you trying to give me that Jedi bullshit about our choices defining us?’ Kylo mumbles into her shoulder, recovering a bit of his old snark.

‘Maybe I am,’ she says defensively. ‘And maybe they do.’

He sighs, extricating himself from her, brown eyes still wet and swollen. ‘Whatever. It’s enough that you’ve chosen to help me; let’s not create more drama.’

‘I still expect you to tell me about my parents, though,’ she reminds him, crossing her arms mock-sternly.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He runs a hand through his sweaty curls and strides off down the dark passage, noticing that his spatial awareness of the Force has returned – as though he’d vanquished the Sith Lords and come out stronger, more equipped to handle the secrets of these crypts.

If he closes his eyes, he can see a glowing sphere in the centre of his Force web, like he is the patient spider, and it merely the trapped insect. And he knows innately that is where the archives are, the collection of Sith artifacts and written instructions he’ll need to complete his training. They can end this scavenger hunt.

\--

‘Come on, Rey,’ he shouts over his shoulder, walking through the undercroft without a care in the world now. Rey trails him, marveling at how quickly his moods swing on their pendulum, that he’d gone from sobbing into her clothes to fierce elation in the space of a few minutes. How can she possibly cope with a _lifetime_ of feeling his emotions through the Force bond?

Kylo sharpens his focus to a fine point as they move towards the glowing orb in his consciousness. He leads the way through another tunnel system, this one leaking light and sand grains from a few small holes in the ceiling – so they aren’t very deep underground. And then they’re _there_ ; the tunnel gradually changing from dirt to smooth sandstone, widening out into curving red walls around a cul-de-sac: a large, airy room with a domed transparisteel roof, showing the swirling patterns of sand above their heads.

‘This is a library!’ Rey breathes from behind him, and he flashes her a small, self-satisfied smile.

‘I hope you realize how special this is, Rey. This archive has been hidden for millennia, since the death of Emperor Palpatine. It’s said that he frequented this library with his apprentice, Darth Maul. The teachings in this archive were what inspired him to make a double-bladed saber, much like yours.’ He nods at Darkheart. ‘There are rumours that Maul kept a diary, hoping that it would be added to the archives someday. So now we get to try to find it, learn from it.’

‘You sound like a schoolteacher,’ Rey informs him, sniggering gently.

Kylo frowns. ‘I studied the ways of the Sith for fifteen years, Rey. Just to breathe the air of this place is a holy rite.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Yes, your Highness.’ She glances around the room, silently admiring the metalwork of the tall shelves, the craftsmanship of the pillars holding up the translucent roof. ‘I have to admit; it does have a certain aesthetic appeal.’

With that admission, she hitches up her trousers and bounds over to a display case crammed with items she doesn’t recognise. Appliances and tools made of smelted ore are labelled with tags in that lettering she can’t read, and she calls Kylo over to translate.

He points to a particularly sinister-looking artifact, made of scrolling metal and curved like an ice creature’s horn, with a serrated edge. ‘According to the tag, that is a Phobis device. They were filled with dark energy that harnessed the power of fear.’

Kylo’s grinning like a kid in a candy store as he translates the tags for Rey, and she has to admit it’s endearing – if she doesn’t dwell on the fact that he’s getting his rocks off over a bunch of evil relics used to torture the Jedi.

Most of the other articles are very run-down, but Kylo treats her to lavish descriptions of each one – a metallic urn he called the Sith Chalice; pieces from a hat labelled the ‘Helm of Iedlis; a pair of black, scaly gloves that he lauds as the gauntlets of Marka Ragnos, whoever the heck he is. Rey laughs to herself, thinking that if she’d taken any of these so-called _priceless_ items to Unkar Plutt, they wouldn’t have fetched even a quarter portion each.

‘Don’t even _think_ about trying to scavenge anything here, Rey,’ Kylo hisses in outrage, reading her mind. ‘It’s sacrilege!’

She scowls. ‘This is just mean. Any one of these apparently deadly artifacts could help you defeat Snoke, and we aren’t allowed to use them. It’s like showing us Nirvana and then telling us the closest we’ll get to it is a black hole.’

‘Life _is_ a black hole, scavenger,’ Kylo tells her matter-of-factly. ‘And I need to study, so you can amuse yourself for a while – _but don’t touch anything_.’

‘All right,’ Rey agrees, staring at him as she walks backwards, deliberately trailing her hand over the nearest case before she darted out of sight.

Kylo grumbles to himself as he searches the shelves for the diaries of Darth Maul, or Nihilus, or even Sidious – anybody who was Snoke’s superior. It’s hard to judge, because if Kylo is honest with himself, Snoke is still a mystery to him after twenty years of communications and fraught relationships.

He’s so very old, and obviously a power player in the Galactic Wars. He had referred to himself as either Supreme Leader or Snoke for as long as Kylo had known him – but instinct tells him that isn’t the man’s real name any more than Kylo Ren is his. And Snoke isn’t a Sith in the traditional sense, but he certainly isn’t just an ordinary Dark Force user.

All this secrecy makes it very hard to know how to defeat his master, and he has to wonder if Snoke had foreseen this as an issue from the first day he’d introduced himself to his young apprentice; and thus deliberately withheld any identifying information from Ben. The idea of such deception makes his temper flare, and Rey’s thoughts flood the link between them, trying to calm him by supplying images of the ocean she still dreams of now and then, eddying and churning foam under cotton-candy skies. _Stay cool. You don’t get to go smashing stuff with your lightsaber in here if I can’t touch anything. Hypocrite._

He chuckles darkly at her insolence, and then he spies a tattered manuscript high on a shelf, an adhesive tag hanging from the spine that reads ‘Maul, Darth’. He summons it with a flick of his fingers, carrying it over to the nearest table. Breath whistling through his teeth in delight, he turns the first page and begins to read, barely even noticing the scavenger as she takes a seat at his side, keeping him company, a stalwart companion even if she can’t understand the language of the text.

They sit there for hours as he painstakingly translates the sharp cursive of Maul’s script inside his head, Rey listening through the bond as he reads. Finally, Kylo turns the last page. And he yawns as he turns to Rey, closing the manuscript.  
‘Boring as all fuck.’

‘I thought you worshipped this stuff,’ Rey says, catching his contagious yawn and covering her mouth, eyes watering. ‘Was there nothing useful, then?’

‘Just that Maul was a rather flawed apprentice. Sidious’s journals should prove more worthwhile, I hope.’

‘Good luck with that,’ she replies, yawning again. ‘Wake me when you’re done - I’ll be napping over there.’

Kylo can’t resist the opportunity. ‘Keep napping the way _you_ do, and you’ll go blind.’

If looks could kill, he’d be just another Force spirit roaming these crypts. He snorts as she walks away, the nape of her neck red as a bloodflower.

 _Tell me, how bitter is the taste of your own medicine?_ he laughs into the link.

 _You should really learn when to shut up, Solo._ She curls up on a table at the far end of the library, leaving him alone with the rows of dusty manuscripts and sealed scrolls. He finds another promising one – the annotated journals of Darth Zannah, and starts the arduous task all over again.

 

 

____________________________________

**Sources for this chapter:**

[Sith Chalice](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_Chalice)

[Helm of Iedlis](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Helm_of_Ieldis)

[Marka Ragnos's gauntlets](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Marka_Ragnos'_gauntlets)

[Phobis devices](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Phobis_devices)


	31. Graveyards

_The cold metal bites into his kneecaps as he kneels, the steel of his helm pressed to the floor. The blood is percussive in his ears, his thoughts howling, body wracked with agony as gnarled, time-worn hands exert a tremendous pressure against his bowed back. How much more suffering would he have to endure?_

_The devil laughs above him, languishing on the obsidian throne._

_‘So much more, my infidelious apprentice. You have not groveled near enough. Look at me.’_

_He raises his masked face to meet the tyrant’s eyes, a clouded, milky blue in the overhead lights. The eyes are calm, but the face they’re set in is twisted with fury, brow sagging over a scarred, dented forehead as Snoke leans forward in the chair, spitting his venom from a mouth full of rotting teeth._

_‘I am the sole person in the universe you can call friend, Kylo Ren. Your mother sold you to the Jedi, your uncle despises you, and your father never understood you. The Galactic Order has put a price on your head, your grandfather is a dying legend, and the girl you trifle with abhors your very touch. And this is how you treat me? I, who plucked you from a life of monotony, who gave you a chance to live up to your legacy?’_

_‘I know what you did to General Hux. I know that you have come to Moraband with the scavenger. I know that you are here to complete your training, and to attempt to assassinate me. But know this: cut the head off the hydra and four more will sprout in its place. I cannot be defeated as easily as you think. Attempting to supplement my instruction with book-learning will get you nowhere. And so I make you a counter-offer.’_

_Kylo’s heart hammers at his ribcage as Snoke leans back on his throne, supporting his head with an emaciated hand._

_‘Obviously, the girl cannot be swayed to the Dark side; it was a mistake to try. I let you get too close to her: I should have expected that your poor emotional control would lead to this infatuation. In that case, I admit that I have had a hand in your undoing. So leave her. Come to me, unarmed, surrender yourself, and I may consider forgiving you for your treason.’ His voice gentles, becoming persuasive. ‘You have been as a son to me all these years – will you turn away from the last shred of family you have?’_

_He leans forward, touching Kylo’s shoulder, crooked fingernails digging into his tunic._

_‘ **Come back to me, and I will let you both live. Defy me, and I will ensure that you regret it.’**_

_\--_

He opens his eyes, blinking away a stray tear. There’s a strange crinkling as he lifts his head, and he realizes he had fallen asleep on the document he’d been reading. It’s ruined: there is a wet patch in the middle of the page where he’d rested his cheek, blurring the carefully penned words into a messy blotch of black ink. Yet more proof that he destroyed everything he touched.

He knuckles at his forehead – his brain feels like it’s been scrubbed with sandpaper. Snoke’s mental intrusion always left flesh memories behind it. _How?_ How did he know? Is the Supreme Leader omniscient? How are they supposed to kill an enemy they can’t surprise? He could run from them forever, with enough foresight.

He grips the edge of the metal table until it buckles, and then he throws the waterlogged manuscript across the room. Everything he’s done - every life he’s extinguished, every sacrifice made to build a future with the Dark side, has been for nothing.

He notices Rey, curled into the fetal position on her own table, at the opposite end of the library. Her clothes are in disarray, caked with dirt and dust from their tunnel expedition, but it doesn’t seem to bother her except for the occasional twitch of her nose, pressed against one bandage-wrapped arm, breathing in the dust.

He moves closer to her, feeling a stab of jealousy over her uninterrupted sleep. Her lashes are fanned over her cheek, emphasizing the smattering of brown freckles across the bridge of her nose. She looks so tranquil – so different from the careworn expression she usually has. He silently lifts a chair out from under her table and sits, watching her sleep, much the same as he’d done the day he’d taken her from the woods of Takodana, kept her prisoner on Starkiller Base. Their roles are well and truly reversed now.

He wants to run. To flee back through these catacombs, find Snoke’s hideout and beg him to fold him back into the dark, to forgive him for killing Hux, for putting the girl’s feelings before his master’s. He wants to escape from her, from _all of it_ , back to what is tried and true.

But those methods don’t make sense to him anymore. Not with the scavenger added into the equation. Before, he’d been perfectly content to walk the worlds alone, utterly devoted to the Dark, to his legacy. But now, with the Force bond and beyond it, he can’t go back.

But then, what has she _really_ done for him? Not enough to tether him to the rebel alliance, to the Light. They’ve shared a total of three kisses, all under duress; two sexual dreams that could be blamed on the Force; and that – whatever that was back on the _Falcon_. It’s not as if they’re _together_. Snoke had put it plainly: she still couldn’t stand him. And yet, he feels trapped here, chained to her by more than just the Force.

Kylo is backing away from her when her eyelids fluttered, and she awoke, her hazel eyes clouded with sleep. ‘ _Ben_?’ she murmurs sleepily. ‘What’s going on?’

For one insane moment, he wants to open up to her, to loose the enormity of the truth onto her as she rubs her sleepy eyes, to ask her what the right _choice_ is between returning to his life of misery at his master’s side to spare her life, or continuing their kamikaze mission to kill him. She’d told him that a person’s choices defined them, and he still didn’t believe it. But when she repeats her question, asking if he was all right, he chooses to hold back the tide, burying the truth alongside the years of pain, anger and all other emotions he couldn’t face. His mind is a goddamn graveyard, and he shuts it off to her as best he can, clearing his throat.

‘We need to get back to the ship,’ he manages, his voice raw.

Rey sits up on the durasteel table, scratching at her scalp. ‘Seriously? After all the trouble it took to get in here?’

‘The library’s not going anywhere,’ he reasons, tamping down on the irritation that rises up, unbidden, whenever she challenges him. ‘If we need to come back to study, we can. The ghosts won’t bother us again.’

‘How do you know?’ she retorts, but eases herself off the table anyway, wincing at the crick in her neck. For a long moment, they face off, Kylo doing his best to disguise his fear. Either it works, or she just doesn’t care how he feels, because she inclines her head and they walk out of the library and back through the network of tunnels, retracing their footsteps, keeping track of eachother in the gloom.

 --

Back on the corvette, Rey hunts through the meager supply crates that have been loaded onto the ship. She has to laugh when she finds a carton of portion-packs: Luke certainly has a strange sense of humour. Her stomach growls, and she picks up four of the packs, but the ingrained years of rationing food on Jakku won’t let her take more than one each for her and Kylo.

There’s no stove on the little starship to fry the rehydrated veg-meat, so they eat it raw, sitting at the table. Neither of them mention the deep, carbonized gouge Kylo had made in the middle with his saber. But it’s obviously on his mind, because once she’s finished chewing he looks up at her and asks if she wants to practice more Forms.

‘Sure!’ She pops the last strip of bread in her mouth and stands up, unclipping her lightsaber from her belt and hitting the activation switch before Kylo can move. He’d expected casual indifference from her – so the enthusiasm for a fight is very charming. He ignites his saber, twirling it like a lit sparkler, leaving electron trails hanging in the air.

‘We’ll start with Form V, but skip _Shien_ and go straight to _Djem-So. Shien_ is just a dressed-up version of _Soresu_ anyway.’

‘More show, less tell,’ Rey scolds as she shuffles her feet. Kylo smirks at her and throws himself forward, instantly on the offensive, the sizzling red of his saber consuming her vision as he slices the air next to her face.

She blocks his next few strikes, ducking and weaving out of the way as he attacks brutishly, no choreography to his swings or footwork; pure violence driving him forward. She bats at his saber ineffectively, trying to diminish the severity of his strikes. She’s tiring fast, and there is no gap in the blitz of his attacks to get a swipe or two of her own in – she’s reduced to simple defense, reversing as he chases her around the cabin.

Giving up on saber combat, she throws her free hand out and sends a Force-blast in his direction, and Kylo skids back a few metres, nearly colliding with the wall of the shuttle. Rey smiles: his strength and stamina might outweigh hers, but when it comes to the Force, they are evenly matched.

He launches himself off the wall and swings wide, giving her an opportunity to cut in with her own offense. She holds the hilt of her saberstaff in a loose grip as she spins it through the air, the double blades blurring into a haze of pink as they batter his saber. Then her grip slips, and Kylo slices, and suddenly there’s a searing pain at her ribs, and the smell of cooked flesh fills the enclosed space.

‘ _Shit_!’ Kylo growls, dropping his unlit saber. He wrenches hers out of her hand and tosses it away, yanking her wrap sideways to inspect the already heat-sealed wound. Rey’s breaths hiss from between clenched teeth as his fingers probe the blistered skin, and then she feels the link bloom like a nightflower between them, filling with light as Kylo heals her skin with the Force. She can hear his whispered incantations, willing the burn to disappear and her flesh to mend. She beams, a morphine dream, as the pain abates.

‘You’re using the Light to heal me,’ she murmurs, and he jerks his hand back from her skin as if she’s burned _him_.

‘It was less… expensive to use the Light in this case,’ he says defensively, retrieving his saber from the floor and holstering it. ‘Dark side healing is temporary, plus it takes some of my life force to replenish yours. I wasn’t going to shave years off my life to mend a minor burn.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she grins at him. ‘You know, that’s the first time you’ve done that – healed me. I saved _your_ skin twice.’

Kylo glares down at her, thinking privately of Snoke’s threat. ‘So, are we even then?’

‘Not even close,’ she teases, edging closer to him until they are almost touching. ‘But, if you like, we _could_ have a rematch, so if you hurt me, you can heal me again.’

‘I’m not playing this game anymore,’ he snarls, looming over her. ‘Why don’t you run off to your room and play with your _self_ , Rey? That’s how this normally goes, isn’t it?’

His dark eyes are full of heat as he stares at her, his nose nearly touching hers, and Rey is suddenly short of breath, realizing that her last excuse had been melted away with her lightsaber burn. He’d used the _Light_ side of himself to heal her – the Light he’d sworn was extinct, that she’d half-believed had been snuffed out, despite the proof in front of her eyes when she’d explored their Force connection.

He cares more about taking away her pain than his morals – and the urge from their last battle hits her again, even more powerfully, screaming at her to kiss him, touch him, to do _everything_ -

She can’t resist, doesn’t even want to. She meets his eyes with a blazing look, and tells him, ‘New game.’

She hooks an arm around his neck and chases his mouth with hers; standing on tiptoe as his arms slowly, tentatively snake around her. Every nerve of her body is set alight as Kylo lifts her off the floor without breaking the kiss, his rough hands sliding over the skin of her back, sending a shiver up her spine as he scoops her legs up under one arm, bridal-style, the way he’d carried her back to his ship on Takodana. Her feet knock against the paneling of the walls as he carries her through the starship, into the crew cabin.

He dumps her on the tiny cot, her hands snagging on his arm at the last second and pulling him ungracefully down on top of her. Kylo manages to catch himself on his elbows before crushing her, letting out a quiet, adorable ‘ _oof’_.

She can feel herself beginning to redden with desire, and there’s a wetness in her underwear that she would normally be embarrassed about, but can’t bring herself to care as Kylo attached his lips to her neck and suckles at the skin there, raising bruises like bunches of grapes and sending bolts of heat lightning through her body, gathering at the base of her back, eliciting a desperate need for _more_ : more touch, more friction, more him. They’d lit this fire the moment they met, but the spark had been blown to smoke and rekindled over and over, nurtured recently into the insatiable blaze it is now.

Neither of them speak as he reaches out and tugs her wrap and shirt over her head, doing the same with his own robes as Rey wriggles out of her trousers, leaving her in nothing but her damp underwear.

At last, there they are: her spread out on the cot in her knickers, him shirtless but still wearing pants, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he takes in every detail of her body: the rise and fall of her small breasts, the indent of her waist and the curve of her hips, her elongated legs and slim, toned arms. Her pink, kiss-swollen lips and bright hazel eyes.

Rey studies him, too: the creamy skin of his chest and back, dotted with freckles like starfields, so strangely appealing. She sits up and kisses each freckle one by one, unable to stop her hands from roaming, touching the hard bones of his shoulderblades, the tautness of his chest and stomach, the definition of his pale arms. She never wants to _stop_ touching him.

Her fingers move to his waistband, struggling to remove his pants as she tilts her face up to kiss him again. _Multitasking’s hard_. He laughs into her open mouth, the sound sinful and lovely and so damn hot as Rey finally gets his trousers off, and then she’s pulling him down on top of her, and he peels her underwear away, lifting her feet to pull them through the holes and throwing her panties off to the side of the cabin.

She peppers his neck and chest with tight-lipped kisses as he pauses above her, the point of his nose brushing against the crown of her head. _Are we really doing this?_

She smiles at the question, remembering Finn asking the same thing as they’d fled Jakku together in the stolen Corellian freighter, navigating through the bones of a dreadnought to escape a tenacious First Order pilot, pulling stunts that practically rewrote the laws of physics.

She reaches up and takes his face in her hands, crushing her lips to his, her tongue licking into his mouth. She kisses him like she is underwater and he is a bubble of oxygen. _Yes_.

He doesn’t need any more encouragement. Neither of them say another word, too afraid that if they start talking, they’ll devolve into arguments like they always do. _Not talking is better_ , Rey decides as Kylo lets his hand play over her tummy and legs, brushing against her inner thighs and then – oh, then, he’s parting her folds and rubbing his fingers in concentric circles over her clit. She grinds herself into his hand as it strokes over her labia, letting out an ungodly moan as his fingers play at her entrance, teasing for a moment before he dips a finger into her, dragging it back out agonizingly slowly, making her legs shake like sapling branches. He is gifted at this, at extracting pleasure from her one sweet drop at a time. His hands move to her breasts, tracing her nipples, dusty-rose and beautiful, until they peak, and then he descends on her like a ravenous wolf, sucking and nipping at her breast, making Rey curl her toes so hard the bones crack.

He drags his teeth over her areola, and her knees turn to jelly underneath him. She notices that he’s still in his underwear, and she yanks at the waistband mock-angrily as Ren turns his attention back to her neglected lips. His fingers knife into her as his mouth moves against hers, kissing her violently as she whimpers, her legs clenching with every plunge of his fingers.

He stops the action, and Rey stares up at him through heavy-lidded eyes as he brings his glistening fingers to his lips and _sucks_ them, tasting her. The sight of that, and his crooked, suggestive smile when he sees what it does to her, makes her light-headed, her frantic pulse pounding in her ears, drowning out any and all thought. He stares at her, enthralled, as she sighs and squirms beneath him, and when he kisses her, she tastes herself on his lips, heady and ambrosial and strange.

He finally takes off his underwear, removing the last barrier between them, freeing his erection from the confines of the material. She stares at the length of him, hot and heavy, a pearlescent fluid leaking from the tip of his cock. She instinctively reaches out to touch him, and marvels at how the simple grasp makes him groan and tremble, coming undone. He buries his face in her neck as she slowly, experimentally strokes her hand from the base to the head of his cock, wondering at the texture – hard as a rock, but with skin softer than velvet.

She tightens her grip, and he gasps into the shell of her ear. She turns her head to kiss him and catches sight of the agony on his face: teeth gritted, hyperventilating, eyes wide in shock or awe as she pumps him with one hand, the other hand venturing over the backs of his thighs, squeezing the globes of his bottom. He arches against her, driving his cock deeper into the well of her fist.

He bites back a moan as she toys with him, smearing pre-come over the head of his cock and looking up at him coyly from under her lashes. He wants to bury her face in the pillows and fuck her like he hates her, like she’s still nothing to him but a prize to be won.

Guessing what he wants, she palms his length once more before wriggling down the cot until they’re lined up, and he gives an embarrassing gasp as she guides him down onto her, into her: her lips enveloping the throbbing tip of his cock as he sinks slowly, inch by giving inch; her flesh uniting with his until he is buried inside her, unable to control the noises he’s making anymore as she undulates beneath him, so velvety smooth, warm and _tight_ beyond belief. He bucks his hips wildly, the bond between them humming with light as he slips in and out of her, the sounds they make amplified in the quiet room, filthy and wet and like music to his ears. He changes angles to thrust deeper inside her, and _oh god, yes_ , Rey hitches her hips up to meet him and keens his name in a low, anguished voice - and he loses it completely.

‘Oh, _fuck_!’ he gasps as his vision whites out, collapsing as he spills his come inside her, jerking like a string-puppet as tremors overtake him and starbursts of light pop inside his brain.

Bonelessly, Kylo slides off her, hiding his face under her arm, flushing red. Rey pats his hair, her body quivering as she tries not to laugh, before breaking into a fit of the giggles so strong it shakes the cot.

‘Way to kill the mood, scavenger,’ he mutters into the skin of her arm, and she tries to stem the laughter.

‘I’m sorry – it was just so funny! And I didn’t expect it to be quite that…’

‘Short?’ he supplies, grimacing as he lifts his eyes to hers.

She stops laughing then, shifting onto a hip and meeting his gaze. ‘Was that – the _first_ time? Doing something like this?’ she asks awkwardly, noting the splotches of colour forming on his cheekbones.

‘No. It has… it’s been a while,’ he says it dispassionately, but Rey can feel the lie through the link, amidst the aftershocks of his climax that still ripple through it.

‘Well,’ she says truthfully, sinking back onto the pillow and snuggling closer to him. ‘It was mine, too.’

He kisses her forehead, chaste and sweet and more than a little sheepish.

_Don’t spread that around. It’ll ruin my reputation._

She chuckles. _I’ll take it to the grave, I promise._

That sobers him up faster than a bucket of ice water. Snoke’s words toll like a funeral bell in his head again, and he recoils from Rey, sliding off the bed and almost toppling over in his hurry to get dressed again.

Rey sits up, the bedsheets pooling over her lap, watching him in confusion. ‘Ben? What’s wrong?’

He doesn’t turn around, pulling his shirt over his head. ‘It’s Kylo,’ he snaps back, facing the wall. ‘And it’s nothing.’

Clothes on, he strides out of the cabin, leaving Rey sitting upright in the cot, staring at the handprints he’d left on the mattress. She stays there for a long time, thinking about the kaleidoscope of his moods, but eventually gets up to wash his residue out of her, and to dress in a spare flight suit.

She knows one thing for sure, she thinks grimly as she refastens her messy buns of hair. They’d just passed the point of no return.

 

 

 

________________________________

Source for this chapter:

[Force healing - light/dark](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_healing)

[Premature Ejaculation ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_ejaculation)(lol) 


	32. Corona

He wants to tear himself apart. The explicit sounds of their sex are still painted on his memory hours later, just as messy and violent as their lightsaber battles. They can’t seem to be gentle with eachother, or at least not for long, he thinks angrily as he sits in the pilot’s chair, toying with the buttons and levers on the dashboard, as in front of the cockpit screen, the sun rises over Moraband’s sandbanks, an emblem for a new, blood-red day.

He can’t understand the dichotomy at play here: he’d just been inside a woman for the first time - he’d fucked _Rey_ of all people, the girl he’d coveted since before she’d forced her way into his head on Starkiller - he should be overjoyed. And yet he’d never in his life wanted to run away so badly, not even when his mother had deposited him, alone and friendless, at his uncle’s Jedi academy. The thought of just jetting off without her, putting Moraband and her in his ion trail and never looking back, is so attractive – and he knows it is because of Snoke’s warning. It’s ruining everything.

He and his master have that in common.

The girl enters the cockpit, drawn by the typhoon of his emotions in her head. She doesn’t say anything, but curls her arms under his, hugging him from behind as she presses her soft cheek against his.

His mind is like a bruise when she touches it with hers, ruptured under the surface and leaking darkness like blood. She can hear his thoughts: _you break everything you touch, just run, before you hurt her more-_

‘You haven’t hurt me,’ she whispers, trying to placate him. ‘At least, not lately.’

Kylo laughs mirthlessly as he disentangles himself from her arms. ‘Not lately,’ he repeats darkly. ‘That’s of great comfort, scavenger, thank you.’

‘My name is _Rey_ ,’ she bristles, placing her hands on her hips. ‘You ought to know, you were moaning it an awful lot earlier.’

He spins the chair away from her, his face flaming. ‘Leave me alone.’

Rey sighs, pulling up a chair next to him. ‘As much as I’m sorry for wounding your _pride_ , Ben, I didn’t come to mock you. You promised to tell me about my parents – and I’ve already gone cave-diving with you, so pay up.’

‘Now is not the time,’ he mutters, clenching his fists.

‘Why not?’ she cajoles, taking his arm. ‘I thought now would be the best time – haven’t you heard of _pillow talk_? If you’d stayed in the bed for longer than thirty seconds, we could have discussed it there.’

‘I don’t want to _do_ this, Rey,’ he snarls, yanking his arm out of her grasp, steadfastly refusing to meet her eyes.

She looks at his blank face with a pleading expression, a tear beading in the corner of her eye. ‘You promised.’

He is unsympathetic. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time I lied to you.’

She leaps to her feet, the chair legs screeching against the metal floor. ‘I don’t know what your damage is, Kylo. I’d call you a son of a bitch, but your mother is better than that, better than _you_. Go to hell.’

She stomps off in the direction of the cabin where he’d taken her virtue, and she his. There’s too much between them now – the complexity of their relationship is too much; too many thoughts, worries and wants vying for his attention. He can feel the beginnings of a migraine coming on, and he kneads his temples, trying to think.

\-- 

Rey flops down on the mattress, rubbing her eyes fiercely. There’s no way she’ll let herself cry over _him_. She won’t give Ren that honour.

She’d felt so differently about him after their lovemaking, tender and sweet as he’d deflowered her – it hadn’t even hurt or bled, not like the horror stories she’d overheard amongst the crones at Niima outpost. But he’d destroyed those feelings with his rejection, the breaking of his promise. She doesn’t know why she’s so hurt – it isn’t the first time he’s double-crossed her, after all. But he’d given her a taste of hope, and then ripped it away from her, leaving her craving and unfulfilled.

He might have used the Light to heal her wounds, he might have treated her like a princess in the bedroom – but he’s still a killer and a liar, and she despises him for that.

She can still feel the tumult of his thoughts through the bond, and she clamps the pillow over her ears to try to shut them out. It’s probably the placebo effect, given that their _minds_ are linked, so muffling her ears won’t help one iota – but the turmoil lessens. She lies flat on the bed for a long time, brooding, until she sees movement out of the corner of her eye and looks up.

Ren is leaning in the doorway, an odd smile tilting his lips up as he watches her. She gives him a look of pure loathing. ‘What do you want _now_?’

He steps closer, drawn to her contempt like a steelpecker to osmoridium. He sits down at the foot of the cot, carding a hand through his black tangles, and Rey tries to forget the feeling of those curls tickling her neck as they’d rocked together.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. Rey blinks at him uncomprehendingly – it’s the first time she’d ever heard him apologize for anything. The Kylo Ren that she knows doesn’t atone for anything. ‘I was confused, before. I – I wasn’t lying to you when I said I would tell you what I know.’

She sits bolt upright on the cot, her heart jumping into her throat and beating there like a hummingbird’s wings. ‘And what do you know?’ she chokes out.

Kylo clears his throat, his eyes full of unease. ‘I’ll start by saying I have no idea who your parents are.’

Her heart drops like a stone, hurting her chest and making her breath stutter. ‘O-okay…’

 --

This will be a litmus test for him. He realized that as soon as he made up his mind to tell the truth. If he told her and she denounced him, he would return to Snoke with a heavy heart, but assured of her safety. If she – for whatever crazy reason – didn’t hate him for what he’d done, they would stay together and keep scheming to kill his lord.

The words are like razorblades as he voices them. ‘When I was fourteen, a new recruit was brought to the Jedi academy. A three-year old child already showing signs of exceptional Force sensitivity. I was furious with my uncle for allowing a _toddler_ to be accepted into the rank of Padawan, and jealous of her prowess with the light, even as I slipped further towards the darkness. I hated that kid, swanning around like she owned the place, conjuring balls of light and making them bounce off the walls of the training rooms, like the Force was something to be _amuse_ yourself with.’

‘But for some reason, she took a liking to me. She followed me around like a lovestruck duckling, and it was annoying, but she started to grow on me, too. I could feel how lonely she was, how her affection for her parents had transferred to me, like I was her big brother or something. She’d chatter incessantly, try to get me to play stupid games of hide and seek with her. And she felt more like family than Luke had for a while, even as the other Padawans started to shy away from me, sensing the darkness growing.

He pauses for breath then, and Rey leans forward on the bed, desperate for more. Kylo’s lips tremble a little as he prepares to say the worst part.

‘Snoke had been whispering to me, encouraging me through my dreams for years, and I had listened, but I had begun to really believe what he was saying by the time the girl arrived. She was the bright point of my days at the academy, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from pledging myself to him. I believed him when he said I could be greater than Darth Vader, could make better use of my talents through the Dark side.’

‘Luke was a weak master - he counseled me to quash all emotion, which I could never fucking _do_ , and the failure hurt, more than I could admit. Snoke convinced me that with the First Order, I would never be told to hold back my temper; that my emotions would make me stronger. He asked me about the other Padawans, and sympathized when I told him how much I hated them for being scared of me, for making me more of an outcast than I already was – abandoned by my mother, disliked by my father, the goddamn black sheep of the family. So a couple days after my fifteenth birthday-‘

He cuts himself off, his throat dry and scratched. He doesn’t have a hope in hell of saying the rest out loud, so he beckons Rey closer. She shuffles up to him, and he takes her hand, lifting it to his cheek as he did the same to her, burrowing into their bond. He feeds his memories into the link between their brains, Rey stiffening as unfamiliar pictures and sounds begin to reel through her mind.

_He cried for what felt like hours, locked in his room, his beige Jedi robes in burnt strips on the floor. His new master left him alone as he sobbed, giving him privacy until he stopped shaking and stood up, moving to the mirror on his wardrobe door. His reflection showed red-rimmed eyes and puffy, tear-streaked cheeks above a new, black robe – an assassin’s uniform. The tail of his Padawan’s braid snaked over his shoulder, and Ben stared intensely into the mirror as he roughly hacked it off with scissors he’d swiped from one of the other student’s rooms, throwing the severed bunch of hair next to his shredded robes._

_He could feel Snoke’s pleasure, humming like a swarm of bees in his mind. He looked in the mirror again as he pulled out the lightsaber he’d forged in secret, with the damaged synth-crystal a visitor had smuggled to him three moon cycles ago. It was time._

_He ignited the lightsaber, the crackling of the blade filling his ears with static, nearly canceling out his master’s exultant whisper: Yes, my boy. You are glorious._

_He would think of those words as he methodically cut down his peers, the other Knights of Ren supporting him. As they begged for their lives, mewling piteously as his saber scorched holes in flesh, as death took them, he knew that he was magnificent._

_One of the Knights turned to deal the killing blow to the last Padawan, the irritating little child, as she lay stunned in the mud, paralyzed by a Force blast. Her eyes, wide and bright as planets, blinked up at them as the Knight aimed his mace at her tiny chest. The blow would pulverize her bones, cave in her lungs, leaving her to drown in her own blood - he could see it happening before it did._

_And as the Knight swung, Kylo thrust the saber through his armoured back. The other Knights roared in shock, and Ben screamed back at them: they were done here, this one was his. The skinny teenager looked so deranged, so completely demented with rage and grief, that they all agreed._

_Ben put the four-year-old into a state of unconsciousness and carried her onto the waiting First Order vessel, separate from the rest of the Knights. He made a few unsuccessful attempts at mind-tricking the pilot into a small detour before it worked – they stopped on a random junkyard planet in the Outer Rim, and Ben mind-controlled the pilot to take the child to the nearest outpost and sell her to whatever authority figure looked reasonable. He coaxed her awake from inside the ship as an oily-looking Crolute took her hand and dragged her towards his outpost stall._

_The ship soared off the desert planet, and Ben watched from the rear window as the child and her owner became specks on the dusty landscape. He bit his knuckles hard to stop himself from weeping, as the last thread tying him to his old life was cut._

_Kylo Ren turned away from the window, holding the hilt of his lightsaber like a sacred thing, like a prayer._

_\--_

He gently pulls his hand from her cheek, afraid to look at her as she works through the enormity, the monstrousness of the truth. Her cheeks glisten with silvery tear-trails, and he wipes them away with his sleeve. She lets him.

‘So you knew me for a whole year,’ Rey sums up, in a strangled voice. ‘You knew me when I was small, and you dumped me on Jakku with that slimeball Plutt, to be abused and to starve.’

‘I figured it was better than _dead_ ,’ he confesses, bunching the bedsheets into knots with anxious fingers.

‘Why did you spare _me_? What made me different to the other Padawans?’ she asks, another tear slipping down her face.

‘I’ve never been sure. To be honest, it was something I regretted later, leaving a loose end. But I’ve mulled over it for years, and I think that even though I hated the manifestation of the Light was in you… I wanted to keep it alive. It was pure and bright and beautiful, and whenever you smiled at me or followed me round the training complex, I felt better, more stable. You have more Light in you than I ever did, and for some reason, I wanted to protect that. So I couldn’t let him kill you.’

‘Right,’ Rey says faintly. ‘So your way of cherishing the Light was to maroon me on a desolate planet and hope for the best. Good one, genius.’

Kylo grimaces. ‘I told Skywalker some of this. Snoke knows, too, the stripped-down facts – though I don’t believe he realizes that you are the girl I saved, so many years ago. When I failed to extract the map from you, he told me I was weak because of my compassion for you, and he was right. But it was never _just_ compassion, Rey.’

She lifts her head, wiping at her eyes. ‘Then what was it?’

‘Don’t you _get_ it by now?’ he says bitterly. ‘I’m in love with you. I’ve _been_ in love with you from the moment you tried to shoot me in that fucking forest. I just got confused, interpreted it as misplaced lust for the enemy, or for power over you. But it was worse than that.’

‘I love all the things I’m meant to hate about you: your strength in the Force, your pigheadedness, how against all odds you flourished on that trash planet and taught yourself to fly starships. I love your face, the way your nose crinkles up when you laugh, and how you blush when you’re furious. I love it when you insult me and when you kiss me.’

He cups her face in his hands, and his eyes burn angrily into hers, the link between them smouldering, a corona of light eclipsing the darkness. ‘There are entire worlds in you, and I have fallen in love with every one. So I’m going to shut up now, because I already know you don’t feel the same, and I’m done with this bullshit confessional.’

The soliloquy is over, and Rey sits there, dumbfounded. He waits for her to say something, _anything_.

Slowly, her hazel eyes meet his, their normal bright sparkle dimmed, muted by grief.

‘Okay. You love me. We’ve already established that. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve either killed or tried to kill everyone I’ve ever known. You’re my personal curse, cropping up wherever I go. You left me on Jakku, nameless, to slowly perish, waiting for my parents to save me. You ruined me.’ She says all of this matter-of-factly, her voice inflectionless.

Rey rises off the bed, walking to the door on wobbly legs. She looks back at him over her shoulder, her eyes liquid with pain.

_You’re right, you know._

_Right about what_? he thinks dully, eyes trained on the bedsheets.

_You break everything you touch._

She strides out of the ship and into the desert heat. Her turn to abandon him.

 

 


	33. And Over Here, You Can See Me, Ruining Everything

It’s astounding, really, how quickly he’s managed to ruin everything. Award-worthy. Her parting words cut at him, barbed wire on his skin, but they don’t sting half as much as the humiliation.

He’d torn his fucking heart out and thrown it on the bed in front of her, black and bleeding, and she’d rejected it. And now she _knows_ how he feels about her, and it makes him even weaker, more pitiful than before. He isn’t supposed to give a fuck about anything but the Dark Side – killing Han Solo had been about proving that, to himself and to Snoke. Family bonds, relationships, _love_ \- they are trifling, insignificant next to the grandeur of becoming a Sith Lord.

But Rey has gotten under his skin, an obstinate light that gleams at the back of his mind even in his darkest moments. She’s destroyed his focus, his social standing, and most recently, his heart. And the worst part is that he deserves it. He doesn’t deserve _her_. And just because they’re Force-bonded doesn’t mean she has to love him back.

He wants to break the Bond then, wants it so badly it makes his heart skip. If he’d had a med-droid and a scalpel handy, he would have ordered it to open his skull and prune every synapse, every memory, sever each connection between him and her. It would have been worse than useless – their bond is evanescent, ethereal, not stored in grey matter. According to his uncle, it will outlive them if one of them dies, tapering off into the void, connecting either of them to the dead one, forever. Worse than a ghost; there’s no way to exorcise it. The fatalistic thoughts give him no relief, and a vein stands out in his forehead as he balls his fists, trying not to go to pieces.

 _Screw it._ White-hot adrenaline drags him out of the bed, sends him hurtling down the ship’s ramp and out into the Moraband wasteland. The acrid reek of the atmosphere burns his eyeballs – they water, streaming as he runs after Rey, her Force signature shimmering like an oasis in his mind.

He climbs a steep dune, pausing at the top to scan the wilderness for her. A trail of bootprints mark a flat patch of sand, and he tracks them to the same place they’d been yesterday: the hidden entrance to Darth Bane’s tomb.

The obelisk is still embedded in the cliff-face, so he guesses Rey must have remembered the password, and adequately repeated it in the old language. _Most impressive_. Either that, or she’s erased the rest of her tracks and gone elsewhere.

He speaks Bane’s oath, and the maw of the tunnel yawns wide to admit him. He picks up faint traces of Rey in the ether as he crawls along the shaft, and he sets his teeth in determination, rolling out the other end of the tunnel and stalking through the mausoleum, making a beeline for Darth Bane’s burial chamber, where her Force signature has gathered. He can sense her emotions as he draws near: the profound depth of her melancholia, overlaid by a small throb of excitement - but over what? What has she found there?

He lopes into the tomb, half-expecting to find the phantom Sith again – but he sees something much more petrifying.

Rey is bent over the sarcophagus of Darth Bane, pushing the marble slab of its lid out of place. _She’s opened his coffin._

‘ ** _NO_**!’ he roars, sprinting over to her and tackling her to the ground. They bounce down the stone steps, grappling with one another in the darkness. Ren’s head is about to combust from terror – she’s besmirched the resting place of one of the last and most lethal Sith Lords.

They wait, locked in their violent embrace at the bottom of the steps, but there is no retribution. Just the sweet smell of decay, of oxidized bone wafting up from the open casket. Kylo retches.

‘ _Get off_!’ Rey shoves him away, more violently than necessary. He rolls over on the stairs, slightly winded – he can already feel the bruises budding under his skin from their fall. He’d taken the brunt of the impact to his arms and pelvis, and they ache as he stands up, trailing the scavenger over to Darth Bane’s open sarcophagus.

‘What are you _doing_?’ Kylo hisses, and she hushes him as she reaches into the coffin, displacing moth-eaten bones and mouldering fabric to pull out a small, triangular device, embellished with golden hieroglyphs and tracery. Kylo leans closer to the object, recognizing the distinctive shape, the black crystal at its zenith.

‘It’s a _holocron_ ,’ he breathes, staring rapturously at the pyramid in Rey’s hand.

‘A what?’ She raises her face to his, her expression aloof. Clearly, she’s still angry with him – that’s very irksome. He’s already given her his most heartfelt apology – not something that’s happened often in his thirty years of life – what else is he expected to do?

‘If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you,’ he says petulantly, and holds out his hand for the holocron.

Rey raises her eyebrows at his expectancy. ‘Oh, do you want this? Tough luck. You were the one who told me not to touch anything.’

‘And look how well you listened,’ he sneers. ‘You could have gotten yourself killed. There could have been a curse on that tomb, or the holocron.’

‘Well, nothing happened, so stop being so disagreeable.’

‘Disagreeable?’ He barks a laugh, his temper flaring. ‘ _I’m_ the disagreeable one? You’re the one who won’t accept an apology for something that happened _fifteen years ago_.’

‘ _Fuck_ you, Ren!’ Rey shouts, and he retracts his hand, shocked by the epithet. ‘Did you actually think that saying _sorry_ would take away the wasted years, the lack of food or company or family? You robbed me of years I could have spent travelling the galaxy, because I was too afraid to leave the planet in case my parents came back for me. It’s unbelievable how arrogant you are!’

She turns her back on him, starting to push the marble slab back over what is left of Darth Bane’s bones. Kylo watches as she sweats and strains against the weight of the coffin-lid, then adds his own Force strength to the effort, slotting the stone back into position.

‘Thank you,’ she says tartly, and starts to walk away, tucking the holocron into the leather satchel at her waist.

‘Rey.’ Kylo grabs hold of her arm, and she twists round in his grip, her face contorted with annoyance. ‘I _am_ sorry. I don’t know what else you expect me to say. If I could tear a hole in the time-space continuum, I’d go back and make everything better for you. But I can’t change what I’ve done in the past. So what do you want me to do? Get down on one knee and vow to be a better person? Devote myself to you? Because I’ll fucking do it, but you’ve got to stop treating me like this.’

She stares him down, her gaze hard and unyielding. Kylo swallows the last ounce of pride he has left. ‘I – I don’t want you to hate me. I never wanted that.’

Rey is uncompromising in her answer. ‘The creature in a mask, who kidnaps young women, destroys star systems and villages, and treats his family like garbage, even after they’ve forgiven him for bloody murder, doesn’t want me to hate him. How, exactly, am I meant to _like_ you, Kylo? Everything I know about you is awful.’

She wrenches her arm out of his grasp and runs down the steps, her white clothes melting into the darkness of the passageway. Crestfallen, Kylo sets off after her, noting with a stab of rage that he was chasing after her far too much, nowadays.

The scavenger thought he’d ruined her life – well, she’d destroyed his, too. What had become of Kylo, First Knight of Ren, student of Snoke, with a future firmly rooted in the Dark? He’s just as much of an attack dog now as he’d been before, just for the opposite team. He thinks sourly that the Resistance might as well have brainwashed him like Darth Revan – he’d been bewitched anyway, since the day he’d met her.

 --

Rey is sitting at the dented table when he returns to the corvette, the holocron sitting unopened in front of her. She waves a hand over the crystal at its apex, muttering under her breath, and when Kylo approaches her; he notes that her skin has a sickly greenish cast.

‘Rey?’

She glares weakly up at him. ‘Yes? What do you want?’

‘That shade does not become you.’

‘Argh!’ She knuckles her forehead, the green tinge deepening. ‘I don’t know why it won’t open. I’ve tried a few things Master Luke taught me-‘

‘Holocrons only open for Dark Force users, you fool. It’s a Sith artifact, why would you expect it to be easy for a barely-trained Jedi apprentice to make it work? If you keep exerting yourself, you’ll faint. _Stop_.’ He catches her hand as she tries to pass it over the holocron again, hauling her up from the table by her wrist.

‘ _Ow_! Stop dragging me around like a child, Ren. I am not four years old anymore,’ she says hotly, but when he releases her, her face drains of colour and she droops sideways. He snatches at her, managing to snag her around the waist before she hits the floor. The pressure of his arms on her stomach is too much to handle, and Rey heaves, vomiting that morning’s rations all over the floor and down her front. And with that, she passes out.

‘Shit,’ Kylo hisses, gathering her into his arms and avoiding the puddle of sick as he hurries towards the small decontamination shower the corvette is equipped with. Rey is limp as he removes her vomit-splattered clothes, chucking them into the shower with her, the astringent chemicals in the water cleansing them both as Kylo holds her under the spray, making sure she doesn’t fall and crack her head on the tiles.

He turns off the spout and carries the nude girl out of the shower, his clothes sopping wet and his hair dripping rain onto her face, into her open mouth. The droplets revive her in some measure, and she blinks woozily up at him as he takes her to the crew cabin, gently depositing her on the little cot.

‘… I’m not some… shrinking violet to be carried around… whenever you feel like it,’ she murmurs, her eyes opening and closing slowly, her lashes like butterfly’s wings.

‘You could try thanking me for cleaning the contents of your breakfast off you,’ he snaps, but there’s no real bite behind the words.

Rey purses her lips into a white, bloodless line. ‘Thank you.’

She’s thinking back to their conversation, his desertion, he can tell. He crouches down next to the cot, focusing on her face. ‘I never wanted to hurt you, Rey. I was a stupid, overconfident teenager, and I didn’t know what to do with the youngling I’d rescued. So can you forgive me?’ He takes a deep breath and adds, though it hurts his ego, ‘Please, Rey.’

Her eyes flutter open again. ‘I don’t hate you,’ she whispered.

‘No?’

‘I don’t. I hate what you’ve done to yourself; I hate the choices you made, that shaped you into who you are. But I don’t hate you.’

Kylo’s brown eyes lighten, and he tilts his head closer to hers. ‘That’s enough. For now, at least.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘Can I…?’

His gaze flits to her lips, then back up to her eyes. Rey doesn’t know what to make of this temporarily respectful Kylo Ren. She nods her consent.

His mouth brushes against hers, gratefully, almost shyly. Rey rolls over to make room as he climbs onto the cot, kissing her like he’s trying to cure her sickness with affection. It’s actually working, as she unconsciously draws on his vitality through the Force bond, feeling more awake with every touch of his lips.

Their kissing is awakening other parts of her, as well. She knows, in the rational part of her mind, that this is a risky game to play: their first time yesterday could have been a mistake, a _just this once_. Having sex again _means_ something.

Then again, Rey has never made rational decisions when it comes to him. The Force bond is living, breathing proof.

She twines her hands into his curls, pulling him closer to deepen the kiss. Her hardening nipples press against his chest, and she parts her lips to let his tongue explore, dancing slowly, sensuously with her own. She moves her hands to his cloak, trying to unbutton it with lazy fingers, and Kylo breaks their embrace to disrobe, making the peeling off of his surcoat, shirt and trousers look like an art form.

She appreciates how chiseled his chest and abdomen are; his pale skin stretched tight over developed muscles and the suggestion of rib-bones, a scattering of healed battle scars breaking up the smoothness of his skin. His hips are defined, an arrowing v and a trail of dark, soft hair disappearing into his underwear, which he removes as he notices her eyeing them. By unspoken agreement, they’re taking it slow this time.

He slides back into the bed, kissing her possessively, and the link between them warms as though he’s taken a match to it. She can _sense_ his desire there, how much he craves her, how scared he’d been that they’d never do this again after… she pushes his feelings out of her mind and moves her mouth to his neck, running her lips along the corded muscles, making him shiver and sputter out an unintelligible word. He grinds himself insistently against her thigh, and she shakes her head. ‘Not yet.’

He groans, but complies, leaning back to let her sit up under him. Rey wraps her fingers around the width of his cock and begins to move her hand in slow, rhythmic jerks. Kylo’s head drops onto her shoulder, breathing unevenly as she strokes him, brushing the pad of her thumb over the swollen, sensitive tip.

She suddenly drops down, kissing a line of fire down his stomach, pushing him gently so that he rocks back onto his bottom. She places her hands on either side of his legs, lowering her head to his pubic bone and sucking on the skin covering it, making his arms shake as he holds himself upright.

‘Rey,’ he asks, embarrassed by the edge of madness colouring his tone as her lips move lower and lower, ‘are you sure you haven’t done this before?’

‘Nope,’ she replies, and he feels a sudden wetness as her tongue flicks over his glans, licking him for a moment before her mouth descends on his cock, taking the tip into her mouth and sucking hard.

‘Holy fuck-‘ His eyes roll back in his head, and every muscle in his body liquefies and solidifies over and over as she drags her tongue and teeth over his shaft. He cranes his neck to get a glimpse of her; her lips stretched to accommodate his thickness, and he almost comes on the spot. He tries to think of something, _anything_ else as she swirls her tongue against his cock, pulling him deeper into her mouth, and he lets out a high-pitched whine at the sensation, his brain disconnecting from his body.

Rey seems to sense that, and she bends her head, taking her mouth off him for an instant, so he can feel the chill of the air on his spit-slicked skin, and then enveloping him again in warm, wet heat. The urge to rear up and fuck her mouth is becoming unbearable, and he spasms, grabbing hold of those childish buns of hair and keeping her positioned over his legs.

‘ _Do. Not. Fucking. Stop_.’ he snarls, the order coming out sounding like a plea, and Rey _laughs_ , her throat vibrating around him, making him choke and gasp like an injured animal. She withdraws slightly, wrapping her hand around the base of his cock and pumping as she sucks hard on the engorged tip, Kylo falling apart underneath her.

‘You’ve got to – I’m going to – damn you, Rey-‘ he pants, and she doesn’t pay him any attention as he writhes underneath her; giving his cock one last, particularly vicious suck, taking him almost to the hilt, her throat muscles _clenching_ , and with a whispered epithet, his cum spills into her mouth, down her throat. She doesn’t protest, swallowing his seed and detaching her mouth from his length with a quiet pop.

‘ _Fuck_ ,’ he swears violently, flopping back on the bed, taking in gulps of air like a half-drowned man. His orgasm crests through him, his bones turning to goo where he lies. But as his senses wink back to life, one by one, he can feel Rey’s heat through the bond, the throbbing pulse of _need_ in her, and he rolls over, grabbing her knees and prying her thighs apart.

‘Your turn,’ he says seriously, his eyes black with lust. Rey breathes deeply, trying to calm herself as Kylo’s head dips between her legs, his mouth trailing up her inner thigh, nipping and sucking at the sensitive skin. She wriggles, and he clamps his hands over her hips to stop her from moving more. _Lie still._

It’s impossible not to squirm, with his silky hair falling against her thighs, feather-light, and his tongue drawing circles over her clit, running in languorous strokes over her folds. Her back arches as tension begins to coil in her stomach, spiralling out to quicken her heartbeat and make her mind race, almost hyperventilating as Kylo kisses her _there_ , spreading her open with his fingers and lapping up the soaking wetness.

The sensations are intensifying with every moment as his tongue grazes her flesh, and she’s losing control of herself, letting out a stream of inarticulate syllables and sounds. She worms around, her calves clenching around his shoulders as he moans against her clit, the vibration of it, of his lips on her, making her scream and break into tiny pieces on the bed, flinging herself off the mountainside, not caring if she breaks every bone in her body on the way down.

Her orgasm is an avalanche through their link, burying both of them in the landslide of emotion.

 


	34. The Black Crystal

_Practice is the key to perfection_. That thought keeps repeating itself as Rey lays beside Kylo, facedown in the pillows, utterly spent after their exertions. She strokes her hand through his mop of glossy black curls, and discovers that the tips of his ears are glowing adorably red.

‘You’re staring,’ he growls, voice muffled by the pillow.

‘Your ears are blushing,’ she jests, poking one and making him flinch away. ‘I didn’t notice them before – they’re ridiculously big.’

‘ _Thank you_ ,’ he says scathingly. ‘That’s _exactly_ what a man wants to hear after a sexual encounter.’

Rey grinned, devious eyes dropping south. ‘Okay, that’s big too,’ she said. ‘Happy now?’

He groans at the allusion, nuzzling his face into her neck, breathing in the sweet, fragrant smell there. She smells like sweetblossom, that narcotic flower rebels and imperials had self-medicated with, back in the day. He certainly feels intoxicated as he curls up next to her, the cherry-tip of her breast brushing against his skin and making his cock harden where it’s pressed against her leg.

Rey can feel the nudging persistence of it, too. ‘ _Again_?’

He rubs himself up against her hipbone, the _need_ for skin-to-skin contact unbearable. ‘Yes,’ he says in a low, desperate voice. ‘Please.’

Her eyes widen in surprise. If someone had told her two months ago that her kidnapper and archnemesis would one day be naked next to her, practically _begging_ her to have sex with him, she would have whipped them with her quarterstaff, then laughed herself into a fit. And yet, it doesn’t feel wrong. It is _fateful_ ; she suspects if she could decode the deepest workings of the Force, she’d see their names written together, tiny filaments of their lives being interwoven by the maker’s hands.

Maybe it’s the Force bond talking, but when she presses her lips to his, kissing him until their skins fuse together, until they burst into flames on top of the little cot, she knows intrinsically that Jedi and Sith have done this - and will continue to do this - for aeons.

So as they unite for the second time - Kylo panting raggedly as she rakes her fingers through his sweat-soaked hair, her hips canting upwards as he plunges in and out of her - she dives into the vortex of their bond; seeing the heart of a dark star, eroded at the edges with blazing light, being consumed from the outside in.

\-- 

‘We’ve _got_ to start focusing on finding Snoke,’ Kylo bangs a fist on the saber-scarred table, his brows creased with worry. ‘He doesn’t make idle threats.’

They’re sitting in the main cabin of the corvette, refueling with another ration pack each. Rey is studying an atlas of the Outer Rim planets; while Kylo twitches in his seat, eyes flickering from the holocron in front of them, to Rey, then back again.

Rey looks up from the page, chewing thoughtfully on a strip of green meat. ‘You say that, but he threatened to reach out across thousands of systems and rearrange my brain. _That_ didn’t happen.’

Kylo sighs. ‘All right – let’s say he has a flair for the dramatic. But he wasn’t fucking around when he sent me that vision, Rey. If he doesn’t kill you himself, he’ll send a repo man to do the job for him, but trust me, he’ll make sure it’s done.’ He shows her his personal experiences through the link: the times he’d disappointed his master and sat until dawn on the edge of his bed, saber in hand, ready for an assassin that never came. That’s the reality of the Dark side: you are unstable, always treading on black ice, afraid to put a foot wrong in case everything collapses under you.

She can’t stop the goosebumps rising on her arm then. Kylo had revealed the details of the Force-sending he’d received from the Supreme Leader in the archives – he was on a roll with confessions at the moment – and she has to admit that Snoke’s ultimatum made her uneasy.

Kylo had sold her out to save face with him before, and even though their relationship to eachother had changed since then, the stakes are much higher. They’re cheating death by staying together, plotting to kill the currently most powerful Dark Force user in the universe. How can she entrust he won’t take her to Snoke, pledge himself to him, then kill her? She knows how much the feelings that bind them together confuse and agitate him: he only seems at ease when they’re battling eachother, either between the sheets or sparring with their sabers on the command deck. It’s like he has two settings: _fight_ and _fuck_ , and everything goes to pot when he’s not doing either one.

Kylo cocks an eyebrow at her, following her train of thought but not commenting. Instead, he picks up the holocron on the table in front of them, studying the runes inscribed on its surface. ‘I can open this,’ he says suddenly. ‘The runes are instructions.’

‘Okay!’ Rey folds up the atlas and stored it under the table as Kylo steeples his fingers over the crystal, closing his eyes and reciting a complicated sentence in the ancient Sith dialect.

Nothing happens. They glance at eachother.

‘Well, that was anticlimactic. What did you say to it?’

‘ _In the shadows, there is power_.’ Kylo shrugs. ‘It worked for one particular holocron in the past.’

Just as he says it, the crystal glows, blackness pulsing out from it, like shadows made solid. The holocron shudders, then splits apart down the planes of its triangle, something grey and ghostly blossoming from the dark matrix at the centre.

‘What the…?’ Rey breathes as a three-dimensional figure takes shape, clad in a thick crustacean-like shell of armour, eyes glinting from behind protrusions of silver metal.

‘I am the gatekeeper of the holocron of Darth Bane,’ it booms. ‘If you have accessed this device, you must be a powerful dark initiate. How did you come by this holocron?’

Kylo gazes, mesmerized, at the little hologram. ‘Don’t tell him,’ Rey hisses as he starts to speak. She has a feeling the gatekeeper won’t be pleased to hear about her desecrating Bane’s tomb.

‘It doesn’t matter how we found it,’ Kylo says flippantly. ‘Tell us everything.’

‘From the beginning, then.’ The simulacrum bows its transparent head. ‘This is the device Darth Bane used to record his thoughts on the rule of Two, and the knowledge he gleaned from the Dark Lord Revan’s own holocron, which he unearthed on Rakata Prime in the Temple of the Ancients and copied across from that artifact. I will impart to you their secrets: battle meditation; the ritualistic thought bomb; the powers to drain life and nullify toxins. But first, you must understand and accept that learning these powers will change you fundamentally – the Force will transform you through their use. Darth Revan believed that this acceptance of change was a display of an individual’s true power, because no Jedi, constrained by mercy as they are-‘

‘Just tell us how to kill a dark Force user, please,’ Rey chimes in impatiently,

‘Very well,’ the hologram raps out, leveling her with an affronted look. And it melts back into the matrix at the bottom of the holocron, replaced by another, taller figure in a hooded robe, his face disguised by a familiar, slit-eyed mask. _Revan_.

‘I am Revan, Lord of the Star Forge,’ the avatar says in a tinny voice, obviously transferred from somewhere else, as the first hologram had stated. Rey studies Kylo’s face, his expressions shifting too fast for her to analyze. She touches his mind as he watches Revan’s recorded message, and it worries her how dark his emotions are: a blend of regret, happiness and fear, _overwhelming_ fear mounting in his brain. _Fear of what?_

‘… this is the greatest strength of the Sith. It culls the weak…’

His disappointment at those words burns along his nerves like the first frost on Starkiller, cold enough to sear the skin like flame. She feels it all, and she breathes it in.

‘… there can only be one Dark Lord. If a master grows weak, another must rise…’

Kylo’s brown eyes gleam, reflecting the light of the hologram. His thoughts are swirling with the Dark now; so black she can’t see a way out of the pool inside his mind. She wades through it, tasting the bittersweet disenchantment, and his overpowering self-loathing before she rises up and out of the node between them, unwilling to feel any more.

The stormy, passionate mess of a man sitting before her doesn’t resemble the shy, joyous boy she’d made love with hours earlier, and that scares her. He changes so quickly from one pole to the other – from sweetness to ultraviolence. It makes her doubt whether she can ever know him, _truly_ know him outside the constraints of their bond or their intimate knowledge of eachother’s bodies.

Upset by what she’d felt inside his mind, Rey turns away from the flickering hologram. ‘I’m going to practice the Forms again,’ she tells Kylo bluntly, not caring whether he’s listening to her or to Revan’s holo-figure. ‘See you later.’

She leaves him alone with his ghosts, with his fallen idols, and begins to train in earnest.

 --

_He is weak._

The message was pre-recorded, not directed at him. But Kylo smarts all the same.

Darth Revan _exudes_ power, and it’s palpable even through the transference, the copying of his recording from the original holocron. His counsel comes years too late: renouncing the Light, embracing the changes that come with his intrinsic Force ability, eschewing mercy, loyalty, _compassion_ in favour of power, unlimited and unconquerable.

He leaves instructions on detoxify all known poisons from one’s body, Force-drain the life from other dark users, even how to conjure a thought bomb, an act of suicide that annihilates every Force user on the fringes of its blast. He should be elated by the fresh knowledge, but he’s listless, barely listening to the tales of incredible dominance and destruction, which would normally have captivated him. _What’s the point?_ It’s not as if he can pick up these tricks in a few days, and the thought bomb, though attractive in theory, isn’t worth using if it kills Rey and himself along with Snoke.

All he can think is that Revan is everything he fantasized about becoming – a Darth, a majestic and intelligent Sith Lord, ruler of his own dominion. And Kylo had been so close to having it all, if he hadn’t fallen so hard for the girl.

Revan had been swayed to the Light by the Jedi Bastila’s charms, too. But he’d returned to the dark side in the end. Kylo wonders whether the same holds true for him, whether this sort-of love affair with Rey is as transient as the ecstasy he feels after they fuck, and whether he’ll eventually tire of it and resume his path to the Darkness.

Revan starts to talk about a Force ability called battle meditation - whereupon a user could sap their opposition of the will to fight, divert the morale of the enemy towards themselves - and a light turns on in Kylo’s mind, burning off some of the worrying thoughts as Revan describes the skill. It sounds exactly like what Rey did on Starkiller: the way he’d lost the brutality he normally fought with and she’d seemed to gain it, feeding off his rage to fuel her own. And she’d done it again when Snoke had ordered him to kill her, he realizes with a pulse of excitement.

‘Rey,’ he calls, tearing his eyes away from the holographic Darth and getting up from the booth. He can hear the characteristic hum of her saberstaff in the distance, and he makes his footsteps as loud as possible so he won’t surprise her while she’s wheeling it through the air. She’s busy practicing the Juyo form as he enters the cockpit section, leaping acrobatically around the small room, sweat shimmering like sequins on her skin - and there it is, _that’s_ why he betrayed his master.

She’s so beautiful like this, loose hairs spiraling around her face, teeth bared in deliberation, twisting and turning on nimble little feet. She’s so small, but so fierce – an Ewok with the spirit of a Rancor, which shouldn’t be an attractive description, but is. He leans against the wall, watching her move fluidly across the room; supple calves revealed by the swinging fabric of her wrap-dress, her face lit by the pink beams of her staff.

She comes out of her haze of concentration and notices him staring, blushing a little as she smiles bashfully at him, _for_ him, lighting up the black, flinty firestone he calls a heart.

She powers down her lightsaber as he tells her what he’s learned about battle-meditation. Rey races back to the holocron with him hot on her heels, and he manages to figure out how to replay Revan’s recording. Rey’s eyebrows rise higher with each word, and by the end of his speech, she’s unable to contain herself, her hazel eyes sparkling with interest.

‘We can _use_ this, Kylo. This is really helpful. And Luke said battle meditation was Bastila Shan’s speciality! If I can do it too, without realizing it, does that mean…?’

‘Not the Revan and Bastila parallels again,’ Kylo groans, good-naturedly. Rey sticks out her tongue at him over the hologram.

‘Take what I have left you and use it well,’ the real Revan says, accompanied by the armoured gatekeeper, their holo-figures going fuzzy at the edges. ‘Our time here is done.’

They dissolve back into the miasma at the holocron’s core. Kylo has just re-sealed the edges when Rey gasps, scrabbling at the backs of his hands with her nails.

‘Look!’

The holocron is glowing again, the glyphs traced in the surface shining red and boiling. Steam rises from the dark crystal at its tip, and as they watch, agape, the entire structure crumbles in the heat, an internal fire razing the holocron to ash and cinder. And at the centre of the pile of burnt dust –

‘What _is_ it?’ Rey whispers, scavenger instincts kicking in, itching to touch the little black crystal sitting in the ash like a phoenix egg.

Kylo’s eyes are as dark as the gem he stares at. ‘I think… I think this is the crystal that powers the Darksaber. It’s one of the most infamous sabers in Sith history. It has a black blade – Darth Maul possessed it for a time after the Clone Wars. It was lost to history after Maul’s death – he must have given it to the Sith archivists in secret.’

Rey scraped her teeth over her lip, anxious all of a sudden. ‘But why would they put the Darksaber crystal in Bane’s holocron? I thought Bane was around ages before Maul, or am I getting the timelines wrong?’

‘Think about it, Rey,’ Kylo says exasperatedly. ‘The holocron and the crystal are the two most valuable items in the Valley of the Dark Lords, aside from Bane’s bones. What better place to hide valuables than in the _same_ place? _Who_ would have the balls to grave-rob Darth Bane?’ He eyes her pointedly, and she has the audacity to smirk.

‘What are you going to do with it, then? Will you construct a new lightsaber? You could use an upgrade,’ she remarks, and he feigns offense at that.

‘Maybe. _Or_ I could just swap out the synth-crystal I’ve got for this one, and rewire the saber.’

‘Will that work?’ she asks dubiously.

‘We’ll see.’ He lays out his saber-hilt on the table, opening the compartment that houses his faithful, cracked kyber crystal. He hooks it out with a finger, replacing it with the black gemstone. He snaps everything back into place and is about to press the ignition switch when Rey grabs his wrist.

‘Are you insane? You have to _visualize_ the saber as a whole first, like I did when making Darkheart. You’re the one who told me unaligned lightsabers can explode!’

They don’t have time to waste constructing a whole new saber. But he won’t tell her that. Kylo peels her fingers off his arm, grinning at her. ‘That’s half the fun,’ he says, and he aims the lightsaber away from her, pressing down on the switch.

There’s a complete absence of the usual crackling gush of energy, and in the stunning silence Kylo thinks he’s blown them both to kingdom come. But they both see the two light streams, black as a starless night, funneling out of the vents at the sides of the hilt, and the long, smooth main plasma beam.

It’s glorious. He holds so much history in his hands, and it gives him a dark glimmer of hope. Snoke doesn’t yet know they have the Darksaber, or that they have learned the secrets of Darths Revan _and_ Bane. The need to find him, _right fucking now_ , has increased a hundredfold. It’s an information race.

‘OK,’ Rey murmurs, interpreting his thoughts again. ‘I’ve thought of a way to find Snoke. Revan’s speech gave me an idea…’

 

 

 

 

__________________________

Sources for this chapter:

[The Darksaber](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darksaber_\(lightsaber\))

[Darth Revan's Sith Holocron](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Revan's_Sith_Holocron)

[Sith Holocrons](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_holocron) 


	35. Miracles

‘The things he said about battle-meditation got me thinking. Not so much _about_ battle meditation, although I can try to practice it and channel it better – but the Jedi mind trick. You know, the one I plucked out of your brain,’ she grins, baiting him. ‘I never thanked you for that one. In a roundabout kind of way, you were already my teacher before you asked to be.’

Kylo glowers at her, but she’s piqued his interest. ‘I must have pored over every security holo on the backup drive after Starkiller collapsed, trying to figure out how you’d done it. Where did you go after you left the interrogation room?’

Rey smirks. ‘I’ll tell you one thing – I was close enough to hear when you started screaming.’

‘Fuck you,’ he says spiritedly. ‘So you Force-read _my_ mind, then used the knowledge there to mind-trick a Stormtrooper?’ Kylo shakes his head in disbelief. ‘You’re resourceful, scavenger, I’ll give you that. So tell me your plan – it’d better be spectacular.’

 --

‘This is every word in the lexicon except spectacular,’ Kylo hisses to her from behind his sandhill. It’s twilight, a blue-tinged dusk beginning to fall on Moraband, stars winking to life in the vast velvet night.

‘Be quiet,’ Rey whispers back. She’s rather proud of her multi-stage plan: first, they’d moved their cloaked shuttle to an area closer to Moraband’s First Order training complex; second, they’d hiked over to the training facility; third, the stage they were currently at, they’re going to mind-trick the sentries guarding the base doors and sneak in. After that, it’s a free-for-all, but the goal is finding Captain Phasma, one of the few people Ren thinks will be able to pinpoint Snoke’s location. She’s next in the chain of command, after Hux, he told her.

 _Come on_ , she projects into his mind, and she rises from behind her sand dune. Kylo employs the same technique he used when rescuing her from General Hux, using the Force to cloak their bodies in shadow, Rey adding her strength to their concealment through the bond. They walk casually toward the sentries, silent and invisible as phantoms.

The Stormtroopers guarding the door are chatting to eachother when Rey and Kylo stop beside them. Kylo beckons to their blasters and they leap eagerly out of the sentries’ hands, and the troopers cry out as Rey unveils herself, waving a hand in front of their masks and fixing each of them with her hypnotic gaze. ‘You will forget you saw us. You never had weapons. Everything is normal. You will have no memory of this encounter.’

They repeat her sentences, and Kylo envelops her back into the shroud of blackness as they sneak into the facility. The halls are eerily void of movement as they pass, and Rey switches from supporting Kylo’s camouflage to reaching out with her own mind, trying to see through the walls as they walk by. Even invisible, they could still be detected by heat-sensing equipment or any other newfangled tech the First Order have at their disposal. Every second they waste here raises the odds of an ambush.

She touches Kylo’s mind again and is surprised to find he’s calm, though the effort of constantly bending light and soundwaves around them to keep up the smokescreen is taxing his energy. She provides him with strength through the link, redoubling his power as they move through a corridor of stainless steel doors, searching for something that can give them a clue to Captain Phasma’s whereabouts.

 _Stop here_ , his slightly strained voice echoes in her head, and they pause at a door with a plaque above it that reads: **SURVEILLANCE** **.** There’s a sensor pad next to the handle, but Kylo bypasses it and with a wave of his glove, the door cracks open.

They’re both expecting the guard in the chair. He wheels away from the monitors as Rey and Kylo enter, a greeting half-formed on his lips before Kylo drops the black veil and he recognises the outlaws. Kylo waves a hand in what could have been a greeting - the man’s brain shuts down, and he slumps in the chair like a ragdoll. Rey can feel through the link how much raw power and concentration that took, and is quietly impressed.

 _That was nothing. He has a much more malleable mind than yours,_ Kylo boasts, reminding her of the time he’d used that power on her, in the forests of Takodana.

Kylo kicks the chair and its unconscious occupant out of the way and squats in front of the video-screens, studying each looping frame carefully. The screens have handmade labels stuck on above them: **TRAINING GROUND. RECONDITIONING. SLEEPING CHAMBERS. CAFETERIA.** White plastic-clad figures move like dolls across each screen: troopers eating a late dinner in the cafeteria, fencing in the training yards, bunking down for the night.

Ren fiddles with the controls under a particular set of screens, zooming in on an indoor training room where a Stormtrooper in silver armour can be seen, taking inventory of a pile of electrostaffs, designed for riot troopers. Rey feels Kylo’s unease through the bond, tastes his worry like salt on her tongue.

 _This is too easy,_ he mutters into her mind. _The empty halls, the video footage, Phasma alone. It feels like a trap._

 _It could be luck, or fate,_ Rey offers. _The Force is with us._

_That’s not how the Force works. It doesn’t favour any one life._

_Whatever._ Rey moves to the door, trying to emulate the little wave Kylo had performed to open it. It stays obstinately shut. _A little help?_

He smiles enigmatically and opens the door. They peek round the corner, amazed at the lack of an attack squad, an ambush or even a single angry Stormtrooper. Kylo dips into his reserves of energy and resurrects the camouflage ability, and they walk quickly through the halls toward the training sector of the building, following all posted signs and Kylo’s spatial memory of the area. He’d been based on Starkiller, but he’d come to the Moraband training centre a few times to oversee the other Knights of Ren, who are also conspicuously absent. He assumes they stayed on Felucia after the bloodbath, to help establish the Order’s latest killing floor.

Rey sidles round a bend and fingers the lightsaber hilt holstered at her belt, but there’s still no-one to fight as they approach the training suite. Rey tries the hand movement to open _this_ door with Kylo’s telepathic instruction – _you need to_ believe _that the door will open; the hand gestures just emphasize your will_ – and it slides open, noiseless on polished hinges.

Captain Phasma’s helmet jerks up as she hears their footsteps – Ren has dropped the concealment again – _that penchant for dramatic entrances will get us killed one day_ , Rey thinks sourly.

‘Ren,’ the Stormtrooper’s mechanized voice has an odd tint to it, almost like grief. ‘It was stupid of you to come here.’

‘Hello, Captain Phasma,’ he says awkwardly, cheeks turning pink with discomfort. Rey glances between them, picking up on the difference in chemistry between Kylo and Phasma, and Kylo and Hux. He doesn’t hate her. She wonders, with an odd twinge of jealousy, if they’ve ever been anything more than allies.

 _No_ , Kylo says emphatically in her mind. _Nothing like that. She was a colleague._

‘It’s General, actually, now,’ Phasma corrects, looking the pair of them up and down. ‘Someone had to fill the position after what you did to Hux.’ She fixates on Kylo. ‘You look different than I imagined without that mask. More femme fatale than disfigured murderer.’

Kylo smiles half-heartedly. ‘Unfortunately I can’t say the same for you. You know what we’ve come for?’

‘Obviously, you want me to divulge the Supreme Leader’s location. Obviously, I am not going to give it to you.’

‘All right,’ he agrees, raising a hand and knocking her out with an underhanded pulse of the Force. ‘You keep her immobilized while I search her, okay?’

‘How do I hold her down?’ Rey moves as if to sit on top of the prone Stormtrooper and physically trap her on the floor. Kylo rolls his eyes and lets her - one way is as good as another.

Rey sits atop the Stormtrooper, trying to ignore how bizarre this all is as Kylo pulls her chrome helmet off, giving easier access to the new General’s mind. Underneath the bucketlike mask, the Stormtrooper is pretty in a masculine sort of way, with a strong jaw and flaxen hair pulled into a severe knot at the base of her neck.

He touches Phasma’s temples and sends a probe through her thoughts, sieving her memories through his own mind until he finds the one he needs: the chrome trooper striding through a corridor hewn from lava-scarred rock, deep underground – Snoke’s lair is set in the mantle of a Moraband volcano. He pinpoints the location by cross-referencing other memories she has of walking to the door cut into that particular volcano, and triangulates its location with a mix of her spatial awareness and his.

Along the way, he also stumbles across some thoughts and feelings he’d rather have avoided: the general had harbored a healthy lust for that ginger weasel Hux; had fantasized about him a lot, imagined doing certain things with him that make Kylo want to wash his brain with acid after seeing them.

At last, he has everything he wants, and he withdraws from Phasma’s brain, trying to leave it as intact as possible. This next part will be much harder.

 _Rey_? He speaks into her mind, showing her what he needs, and she understands. She shifts closer to him, still pinning the unconscious Phasma to the floor, and her fingers reach out to touch his cheek, the skin-to-skin contact fostering the link between them. He pulls energy from the caress, lent strength catalyzing his attempt to rewrite the memories in Phasma’s brain: Ren’s knockout becomes the effect of a simple sleeping tablet, their conversation just a scarcely-remembered dream. Rey pays careful attention as Kylo’s fingers twitch, rearranging facts to suit their purposes. His strength, his conviction, is astounding to her. If he’d just been with the Resistance from the start, the First Order would never have had a chance to get past inception. He’s a force that could tilt every world off its axis.

Kylo’s masterpiece is finished – every recent memory containing them has been either changed or erased. He gets to his feet and holds out a hand to help Rey up.

‘So did you get the answer you wanted?’ she asks curiously, and he just smiles.

She lets him feed off her Light to help keep up the cloak of shadows as they walk out of the facility, the same way they came. The sentries Rey mind-tricked are still posted outside, and as they’re walking away, Ren suddenly freezes.

‘Shit, almost forgot,’ he mutters, and he drops the concealment, pulling one of the stolen blasters from his belt and shooting a solid slug of plasma at each guard, before they can think to raise the alarm. The troopers fall like sacks of meat into the dust, and Kylo levitates them, one after another, back into an upright position with a flick of his hand. He places their plastoid-covered bodies against the wall so that they’re standing exactly the same as before, and then turns to Rey with a radiant smile, his thoughts gleeful and full of sharp things. ‘Always wanted to try that.’

She frowns disapprovingly. ‘You’ve got one hell of a mean streak, Ben Solo.’

He raises his palms. ‘The blasters are set to stun – what’s the issue? Besides,’ he adds with a boyish grin, ‘they’re the bad guys, remember?’

‘ _You’re_ a bad guy,’ Rey snaps; breaking away from him as they head into the cover of the sand dunes, back to where they’d parked the corvette. ‘It scares me when you hurt people, even people who would have hurt us, because you’re so _happy_ when you do it. Honestly, sometimes I can’t tell whose side you’re on.’

Kylo laughs contemptuously. ‘I’m not on anybody’s _side_ , Rey. Not anymore.’ She’s trudging up a steep sandhill, so he reaches out and snares her arm, reeling her back in until she’s pressed up against him, her little nose poking his chest. ‘That’s not how this works. That’s not what this _is_.’

She blinks up at him, her lips parted slightly. They’re pink as rosebuds, and he wants to taste them, suck on them until they redden and swell with blood and bruises.

‘So what is this?’ she challenges him, and he feels her hunger for him through the bond, deepening as their eyes lock, hers mirroring the blanket of stars overhead.

He doesn’t answer her, just wraps his arms around her and kisses her, saturating the embrace with every emotion he’s feeling right now: _joy, anger, pride, fear,_ all imbued in the unspoken language of their lips. She pours her own feelings right back into the kiss: _happiness, calm,_ _confusion, love._ The last emotion cuts him like a machete to the heart and he falters, tearing his mouth off hers.

‘Well, Ren?’ Rey repeats, a knowing, angry look in her eye. She _meant_ to project those words, those feelings to him. It’s as close to a confession of love as she gets, and it is furious in its intimacy. ‘What am I to you?’

Kylo rests his lips on her forehead, thinking. He turns his gaze to the heavens above them, spangled with distant stars in a bed of blue satin, every constellation only half as bright as the captured galaxies in her eyes. And as starlight pools on Rey’s hair and shoulders like mercury, he knows what to tell her.

‘You’re a miracle.’

She considers that, quietly, as her cheeks glow primrose. ‘You’re quite the poet.’

He doesn’t reply, just kisses her again, an exchange of desire that burns a line from mouth to hands to heart - a wildfire, a love to burn out the stars.

 

 

 

____________________________

**Source for Kylo's cloaking power:**

**[Force cloak/Force stealth](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_cloak) **


	36. Downfall

They fly the corvette to Moraband’s lava fields, and hole up inside the corvette for the entirety of the next day. Rey practices the saber forms and spars with Kylo as he adjusts to his new, improved lightsaber. Rey can’t quite get used to the smooth black blades; she kind of misses the unstable crackling of his old saber. It was a part of him, an extension of his volatile personality, and now it’s gone.

Kylo more than makes up for it with his own instability though, over the next day. He’s ready to find and kill his master _now_ , so they can leave this planet in their dust. Rey keeps trying to remind him that they need to at least _try to_ _practice_ the skills Revan taught them, but Ren seems to subscribe to the _fail first, learn from it later_ philosophy. He’s irascible and on edge for the whole day, and Rey is relieved when dusk begins to fall around their portable home, all the brightness leeched out of the sky to be replaced with navy darkness. Kylo is more at ease at night – like a nocturnal animal, he rises, alert, from the cot he’d been resting on and mixes up a pair of ration-packs for them.

They eat together, Kylo making a face at the stringy toughness of the veg-meat, Rey laughing at him. And when they’re done, they sit for a while, reading companionably in the seating booth. And everything’s calm and nice, until Kylo voices the thoughts he’s kept to himself for the past few days.

‘Do you ever think about death?’

Rey raises her eyes from the page, folding the corner over to mark her place in the book. ‘Erm… yes. On Jakku, death is a constant possibility. There are so many rituals to do to make sure you survive the night – drawing a barium circle round your camp to keep the gnaw-jaws at bay, checking your supplies to make sure you have enough scrap to bargain for food tomorrow, sealing all the open spaces of the house in case a sandstorm blows in overnight. I thought about death every day. Now, not so much – but yeah, I realize battling a Dark lord might end in death for one or both of us. Which is why you asked, isn’t it,’ she says flatly.

Kylo’s mouth is downturned, unhappy. ‘I used to think I wanted to die. That it would be a relief, a sweet release from everything that kept me here: my parents, and the constant influence of the Light; Snoke and his expectation; the birthright I couldn’t live up to. When you left me in the snow on Starkiller, the planet imploding around us, I thought I was going to die, either from blood loss or hypothermia, and it was so _peaceful_. Then Hux came,’ he laughs humorlessly, ‘and stuck me on a transport shuttle bound for Arkanis, with a couple of med-droids to fix the burns you left behind. I let one heal the bowcaster wound, but when the second one tried to touch this one-‘ he taps the jagged lightsaber scar bisecting his face, ‘-I destroyed it. I wanted to keep it, as a reminder.’

Rey reaches out and touches the burn, running a fingertip over the raised, silky skin. ‘A reminder of what? Of _me_? That’s a little macabre.’

‘I kept it, thinking it would serve as a reminder of the unfinished business between us – I was going to murder you the next chance I got. Look what happened to that.’ Kylo’s eyes are saturnine as they think about it - how much their feelings for eachother have changed, how inseparable they’ve become. ‘And now, knowing that we might actually die tomorrow – I’m really, _really_ fucking scared.’

‘You shouldn’t be,’ Rey murmurs, bravely taking his hand and bringing it to her lips, dropping little kisses on his fingertips. ‘Either way, whether we kill Snoke or die trying – you’ll be free of him.’

His dark eyes are still churning with anxiety, but she kisses him, soft and sweet, and it’s enough to calm the cyclone that’s building inside.

 --

Rey wakes in the middle of the night, caught in a nest of blankets, Kylo snoring quietly beside her. Suddenly, the feeling of suffocation, of enclosed spaces and impenetrable walls, makes her want to claw her skin off. She wrestles her way out of the sheets and pads out of the cabin, out of the starship; sitting down on the bedrock of melted stone where they’ve parked the shuttle. She inhales the night air, the pungent odour of sulphur somewhat lessened - or maybe she’s just adjusted to the atmosphere. She watches black clouds pass over Moraband’s largest moon, marvels at the way the stars look like tiny lanterns, hung throughout deep space by some unknowable god.

The breeze ruffles the three buns of her hairstyle, and she unties them, letting the wind play amongst the loose waves of hair. She’s leaning back on the palms of her hands when she feels Kylo’s presence.

‘Rey.’

She twists around, smiling at how soft his features look in the glow of moonlight, highlighting the length of his black eyelashes; his lips seeming even fuller as they curve into shadows, his hair a mess of sleep-tangled curls.

‘Can’t you sleep either?’ She pats the lava-boiled rock next to her. ‘Sit with me.’

He arranges himself on the rock, looking adorably young in his nightclothes, the black undershirt and shorts rumpled by the bedsheets and his restless attempts to sleep.

‘Have you thought about what you’re going to _do,_ after all this? If we kill the Supreme Leader, where will you go?’ he asks her, trying to sound nonchalant, but with an undertone of real worry.

‘You’re asking all the hard questions today,’ she says lightly. ‘To be honest, I think I might become a smuggler. Once Chewie finishes fixing the Falcon, of course. We’ll make the Kessel run in _ten_ parsecs.’

Kylo frowns. ‘Don’t be facetious. Will you return to Skywalker and finish training to become a Jedi?’

‘I – I don’t know. I’d like to say I have absolute faith in my future as a Jedi knight, because it’s so selfless and pure… but I’m starting to think that maybe _I’m_ not,’ she admits, her voice quiet. ‘The things we’ve done, the way I feel – they’re banned by every code I’m supposed to swear to uphold.’

‘So don’t uphold it,’ he urges, stealing her hand and gripping it tightly, nervously. ‘Don’t be a Jedi. Renounce the code.’

‘Like you did?’ Rey shoots back, but doesn’t remove her hand. ‘I won’t fall to the Dark side, Kylo Ren, no matter how you try to tempt me.’

‘I’m not trying to _tempt_ you,’ he mutters. ‘I’m just trying to give you a different point of view.’

‘Fair enough.’ She slips her hand from his and brings it up to his cheek, playing connect-the-dots with the freckles there. His eyes flutter closed, and he presses his face against her palm.

‘Stay with me,’ he whispers, the fringe of his lashes casting shadows over his face in the moonlight. ‘I don’t want to be scared anymore.’

She knows he’s referring to their earlier conversation: his rediscovered fear, now that they were daring Death to duel, terror that one or both of them might not make it through this unscathed. She wraps her arm around his waist and scoots closer to him on the bedrock, resting her head on his shoulder. He’s not content with that for long, though, and his fingers touch the point of her chin before he tilts it up, lowering his lips to hers.

The moment before the kiss lasts for years, and when their lips finally touch it becomes a fragile eternity, spun from strands of gossamer. He’s never kissed her so gently before, like she’s a porcelain doll that could crack under his fingers. Thinking that reminds her of when she angrily told him he was right, that he breaks everything he touches, and guilt gathers like glass in her veins before she pushes it out of her mind, kissing him back with ferocity, painfully aware that this might be the last chance they have to make it count, to _know_ eachother before they meet their makers.

He slides his hands up under her shirt, drawing smaller and smaller circles on her breasts until he’s plucking at her hardening nipples, and Rey shivers under his touch. His kiss sparks a flame between their mouths and that’s _it_ , that’s the part the future generations will remember, the part historians will shake their heads over and say ‘that was their downfall.’

Their bodies have too much momentum, too much trapped energy: they bang into every wall and table in the race to the bedroom. Halfway between the ramp and the crew cabin, Kylo throws her against the wall and kisses her until she can’t _see_ , every other sense crowding out her vision as the phrase _last chance, last chance_ , crosses her mind over and over.

He knots his fingers into her hair, toffee-coloured and loose, tying himself to her in the best of ways as he sucks her neck until the blood blues; bruises growing like lunar phases on her pale skin. He pushes her up the wall until she can wrap her legs around his waist, and he carries her into the cabin, laying her out on the bed and gently slipping off her trousers and shirt, sloughing off his own nightclothes like a layer of unwanted skin.

She unfurls for him like a rare flower, petal by petal, thighs trembling as he kisses the space between them, tongueing the sublime wetness there before rearing up and seizing her tiny wrists, slamming them against the mattress and claiming her mouth in the dark room. He knows she tastes herself on him and the thought of it makes him moan into the kiss, his erection hot and aching against her stomach as he moves his mouth to the little spot under her ear that makes her squirm, grazing the pulse point with his teeth.

The bond between them hums as he shifts his grip on her wrists to one hand, the other playing over her chest, squeezing her breasts before the hand descends to her legs, to what’s between them, and he sinks two fingers into her. She’s so _wet_ , and he could swear her skin radiates with golden light as he buries the bones of his fingers inside her.

Their lips are reverent as they kiss heavy, lust-soaked kisses, and their hands, unbound, move over eachother’s bodies like they’re casting dark spells. Kylo pulls away for a moment that lasts an age, his pupils overtaking the brown of his irises, demon-possessed as he brushes a hand over her hair, fanned out over the pillow. ‘I want to be inside you so goddamn badly,’ he says in a strangled whisper. ‘But I can’t – not if you’re going to leave me, too.’ He nestles his face against her neck and drinks her in, memorizing the honeyed scent of her, like summer blossoms. ‘ _I love you.’_

It’s the first time he’s said the words without anger or bitterness, and that scares her. She doesn’t reply, can’t reciprocate the feeling, and he moves above her again, his face thrown into bas-relief in the blackness, only the sharp angles of his nose and jawline visible.

‘Fuck. I knew it. You’re going back to _him_ ,’ he snarls, his low voice tinged with hurt. ‘ _Fuck_ , Rey. He’ll never let us be together if you go.’

Rey stares at him, hard, then reaches down with one hand, wrapping her fingers over the hot length of his shaft. She lifts her head, her face centimetres from his. ‘Then I won’t go.’

He’s on her then, ravaging every inch of her with hands and mouth, sparks flying wherever skin touches skin, a contagious kind of chemistry. Rey’s hands shoot out, bracing herself against the wall as Kylo positions himself, then drives into her with one long, vengeful thrust, their hipbones colliding over and over as he takes her, deep and hard, the thickness of him filling her so completely that all she can do is whimper and mew, weak with delight as he rakes his fingers over the small of her back, gripping her at the waist like he’s anchoring her body to the bed, pounding into her with unbelievable strength.

There is no rhythm in this raw, animalistic fucking: both of them are speeding uncontrollably towards an inevitable ruin. After mere minutes, his cock rubs something deep inside her at the same time as Kylo’s hand presses down on her pubic bone, and she’s done - Rey _screams_ his name, disintegrating under him, her walls clenching around him as he rides out her orgasm, thrusting deeply into her for a few more violent seconds until his brain bursts with white light and he collapses on top of her, twitching as his come spills, filling her with fluid and warmth.

He can feel himself softening, and when he slips out of her and leans over to turn on the light, the sight of his seed trickling out of her, slicked creamy-white along her inner thighs, makes him almost pass out.

He drops back onto the bed with her, nauseous from the strength of his climax. And he notices Rey is crying, tears seeping out from between her eyelids, squeezed shut.

‘Rey…’ he whispers in her ear, and she opens her eyes, lashes spiky and clumped together with saltwater. ‘What’s wrong?’

Her eyes travel over the gentleness of his expression, his rosy cheeks, the emotions swirling in his eyes.

‘I love you, too.’

The link between them burns brighter than a dying star, and the full range of their emotions reveal the stunning truth: _she does love him_. She would breathe life back into the deadened parts of him; kiss away the pain that spreads like cancer in his soul until he’s better than he ever was. And he adores her. He would throw himself into a sarlaac pit to protect her, tear down the scaffolds of time and space to make sure they’d be eachother’s forever. He’d execute every man, woman and child and use their blood to keep her warm – killing Snoke is nothing, _nothing_ to him now.

As always, she’s light, he’s dark. And when they meet in the middle, they are every colour of the rainbow, the spectrum in the shard, the balance in the Force.

 

 


	37. Phantoms

Kylo wakes early the next morning, the bedsheets hiding his nakedness, startled by the hissing of acidic rain on the roof of their shuttle. Moraband’s storms are like chemical spills, toxic and unusual, so the fact that it’s raining now is a bad omen, at least the way he sees it.

He huddles back under the covers, twining his ankles with Rey’s as she sleeps, charting the expanse of her body with his eyes. It might be the last time he sees her alive, and he commits her to memory: mentally tracing the outline of her lips, the shape of her closed eyes, sketching out her slim, poverty-hardened figure as her ribcage rises and falls. He slips under the sheets to investigate the moles she has in strange places: one just beneath the curve of her right breast, another on the innermost part of her thigh. His eyes travel up the lines of her legs, up to what’s between them, and there’s nothing he wants more than to use his mouth and tongue on her, to kiss her awake so he can fuck her again, so that’s exactly what he does.

Rey awakens with a gasp and a sigh as he licks slowly along her labia, mapping the inner creases with lips that were _made_ for this, and her fingernails claw at his back like she’s trying to unzip his skin and crawl inside it, making a home for herself. She’s always been good at doing that, at eking out little safe spaces in hostile environments, it’s how she survived for so long in that desert wasteland.

They make love for what could easily be hours, passing time as Kylo moves inside her, sweetly and much more tenderly than he’s been in the past. When he comes, even that is gentle, his lips sensually brushing hers as he lets out a soft groan and stills above her. He stays, sheathed within her, long after his cock softens, and they share skin and organs and a heartbeat, enjoying being _one_ while it lasts. But everything ends, even the squalling winds outside, and her kisses fall like warm rain on his eyelids and cheeks as she tells him, ‘It’s time.’

He slips out of her reluctantly, and they dress in gloomy silence. Rey combs her fingers through the hair that’s knotted from thrashing on the pillow last night, and expertly ties the three buns he’s come to view as her trademark.

Kylo’s shirtless and so fragile-looking, bones shifting under his skin as he leaves the cabin, collecting his helmet and the Darksaber from the arsenal in the cockpit. Rey follows him out, catching him just as he starts to slip the awful mask over his hair. She grabs the sides of the helmet and stares at Kylo, at the matte black mask that’s hiding his eyes and nose, only his lips left visible. She stretches up and crushes her lips to his, pouring each daydream, every little infinity into that one kiss, the last one they might ever have if Snoke has anything to say about it. Her hands run up his spine, and he lowers his mouth to her neck, breathing the fragrance that rises off her skin.

‘I want you,’ he mumbles into the hollow of her throat. ‘Forever.’

She lifts a finger to his cheek, quieting him. ‘Don’t stress. Dead or not, if Luke is right about the Force bond, I’ll be right here.’ She combs her fingers through the black curls at the nape of his neck. ‘Always.’

‘Always,’ he repeats, and kisses her cheek before stepping back and pulling the mask completely over his face, any trace of Ben Solo disappearing beneath the veneer of Kylo, First Knight of Ren. He pulls his shirt, surcoat and cowl over his head, fastening body armour and buttons, and he leaves the corvette, striding out into the oppressive heat of the morning. Rey fiddles with the shuttle’s controls, reprogramming something, but within a minute she’s following him into the volcanic landscape.

 --

Within minutes of trekking through the fields of igneous rock, they’re sweltering. Rey’s wide-eyed at the natural phenomena surrounding them, as they pass by steaming pools of milky-blue liquid, steel-coloured poppies budding between cracks in the once-molten stone. Geothermal geysirs spit towering pillars of water and smoke into the sky, spraying them both with moisture as they come upon the chain of volcanoes they’ve been looking for. Kylo’s not even bothering to shield them – they’re completely alone out here. Snoke never imagined he’d be tracked here, surely.

Their senses, tingling in the Force, guide them to an entrance cut into the crust of the first volcano, hidden by an overhanging section of rock. Kylo is the first to venture inside, his footsteps stirring up a cloud of grey ash. Rey follows him into the little corridor, running a hand along the rock-wall that comes back streaked with oily soot.

The deeper the tunnel goes, the more the rock strata changes: shifting from crumbling sediment to craggy black stone, impregnated with veins of cooled magma. There is so much _power_ here, dark and explosive, destroying everything around it. No life here - just ashes, and the eternal fire beneath them.

The winding corridor doesn’t seem to have an end, and Rey worries that it will cave in on them like the tunnel in the catacombs, or drop them straight into the heart of the volcano to die in hellfire. But as they walk further and further, a sense of darkness begins to saturate the air, and it’s not just the absence of sunlight.

They come upon an offshoot from the main tunnel, and there’s a sickly-sweet smell, like mould or rot, that seeps from the walls as they pass through. A prehistoric, terrible evil lurks here. Kylo signals to Rey with a gloved hand and they stop, not even breathing in case it disturbs the silence.

 _He’s in there._ His eyes are trained on the tunnel’s end, where a faint yellow light bleeds into the darkness.

_Do we attack?_

_No. He might still think I’ve come alone, that I’ve returned to him. I’ll go to him, make the first move, and then you’ll come in as backup. Okay?_

_Why didn’t we talk about this_ before _?_ Rey fumes through the bond.

 _Because I knew you’d say no._ His mind brushes against hers, a mental caress, and then he’s edging forward, almost out of reach.

 _Stop_! she yells. He pauses. _If I get hurt – you have to leave. We’re strong when we’re together, but we can’t take him on alone. If I die, Kylo, you have to run. I’ve already program-_

 _You won’t die,_ he interrupts almost angrily, and he walks away from her, his black silhouette outlined by light.

_Promise me._

_I promise._

 --

‘Kylo Ren.’ The imposing voice is the same, but the gargantuan, supernatural figure is missing. Kylo’s gaze darts around as he walks into a cavernous, hollowed-out room inside the volcano, spotting a hunched-over figure in black robes in one corner. The cloaked man begins to walk toward him, and under the mask, Kylo’s face is frozen with shock: he’s never seen his master outside the hologram before. Snoke is so diminutive, so crippled in life, the pervasive influence gone, or hidden somewhere. He’s just a skeleton in a burial shroud, and Kylo feels his confidence come back to him in leaps and bounds. He won’t even need Rey for this.

‘Have you seen the error of your ways, my erstwhile apprentice?’ Snoke rasps, his overlarge hood masking half his face, the scars on his chin warping hideously as he speaks.

‘Yes, Master.’ His voice, filtered by the voice-changer, is carefully emotionless, betraying nothing of the feelings roiling within. Seeing his master again is just as distressing as meeting Han Solo on that oscillator bridge, and he’d been there for the same purpose both times. Killing father figures is all he’s good for.

‘I will, of course, require proof of that statement. Come to me.’ He crooks a finger at Kylo, who is dragged forward a few centimetres, until his former master is close enough to touch.

He can’t let Snoke touch him, or he’ll be done for – he’ll either be swayed to the Dark, or be killed. As Snoke reaches out, Kylo reaches down, and ignites the Darksaber in one smooth, arcing movement up and through his master’s arm, which dissolves in a puff of smoke, insubstantial as the rest of his body, which evaporates too.

 _What the fuck?_ Kylo stares at the space his former master had been, and a throaty laugh echoes around the cavern. The _real_ Snoke steps out of the gloom, waving away the last traces of the spell. A doppelganger illusion, Kylo realizes with a bolt of fear. He should have known Snoke wouldn’t be that clueless.

‘You stupid, stupid boy,’ the Supreme Leader snarls. He’s still small and thin, cloaked and hooded, but his wrath is fuelling him as he lurches toward Kylo Ren. ‘Did you really think that I would be waiting here, defenseless? To threaten my life is high treason. You will die here, at my feet, like the traitorous worm you are.’

Kylo bites down on the terror, replacing it with anger, just as Snoke taught him all those years ago. He holds up the Darksaber. ‘Will I?’

He lunges forward, and when his master turns to engage him, he screams to Rey through the link: _Now_!

She rockets up out of the tunnel, the pink blades of her saberstaff already lit and whirling through the air as she attacks the back of his former master. One of the blades makes contact with flesh and Snoke shrieks with pain, the cry echoing around the grotto. He spins to face her, throwing up a hand to Force-block her next strike. Kylo hacks at him with the Darksaber, ripping through fabric and skin with a hiss of boiling plasma.

Snoke’s power gushes like lifeblood as the pain sets in: he’s energized by it, and his hands come up, dark blue lightning crackling at his fingertips. He laughs, and the sound comes out muddy and wet from his ruinous mouth.

‘This is hardly fair – two against one. I thought I taught my Knights to have honour in battle.’

Kylo swings his blade savagely, trying to shut Snoke up. He doesn’t want to hear about his training, doesn’t want to remember that this is the man he thought of as _father_ for years, whose approval he sought in everything he did. The Supreme Leader deflects the blow easily, accompanying it with a sizzle of lightning that strikes the ground by Kylo’s boot.

Rey surges forward and jabs with the saberstaff, reaching under Snoke’s arm to slice at the bottom of his ribcage, and Snoke conjures a shield out of nowhere, her blade glancing off the black bubble that sits above his skin. It ripples with dark, unstable energy as he catches her with an invisible grip, tugging her feet out from under her. She tucks her chin to her chest at the last second, hitting the ground in a graceful somersault and rolling back onto her feet in an instant. She powers up her saber mid-strike, the light beams blossoming against Snoke’s shield. He roars and sends a fork of blue electricity arcing at her chest, striking her directly above her heart. Rey’s every muscle spasms and jerks, and she’s thrown against the wall by the force of the strike.

Kylo yells in pain and fury as he feels her shock through the bond. The _bond_. Sliding down the wall, struggling to stop her muscles from fitting, she reaches inward for the link and, finding it, opens the connection wide, flooding Kylo’s head with her own power. The battle meditation Revan had spoken of comes instinctively to her, like it had on Starkiller. Eyes closed, she raised Kylo’s strength and stamina, infusing him with fierce, blood red joy for battle, the belief that _they can win this._ In turn, he feeds his strength to her and she stands, shaking off any lingering spasms as she flies at Snoke, trying to draw his attention away from where he fights Kylo, weaponless.

 --

‘After _everything_ I did to make you strong, you were lost after just one _taste_ of her,’ he froths, his hand outstretched to stop Kylo’s saber. ‘Does the rebel slut know what you are? What you’ve _done_?’ He catches Rey in a Force chokehold before she can reach him, stopping her in her tracks as she claws at her throat, trying to pry away invisible hands. ‘Do you think about the masses he’s killed when you fuck him, child? You are darker than even _I_ perceived. Such a gift, but you squander it on him. He will betray like he did his father.’

‘ _On your orders_ ,’ Rey wheezes, blood vessels popping in her eyes from the pressure of Snoke’s strangulation. His only response is to squeeze harder, until heartbeat pulses in her brain, her face turning purple.

 _Rey_! _Don’t pass out! Fight him!_ Kylo’s screaming holes into her brain, or is that her vision? Black holes are blooming before her eyes, becoming large enough to swallow her sight completely. Seconds away from winking out of consciousness, she hears a hiss of connection and a wail of pain, and the invisible hands lose their grip. Kylo has managed to deal a glancing blow to the Supreme Leader’s face, disfiguring and momentarily blinding him.

Rey collapses on the floor of the cavern, her vision blurring, seeing the black blobs that make up Kylo Ren and Snoke duel to the death. The bond between them is a livewire, red-hot with shared pain and fury at what Snoke has done to him, to her, to _them_. He deserves to die like he lives: agonizingly, _gruesomely_. Pure, black hatred for him overflows Rey’s heart, sticky like tar in her veins. The hate pools with Kylo’s, makes her rise despite the pain in her eyes and throat, and her numb hands switch on her lightsaber. Snoke doesn’t notice, too busy fending off the First Knight’s onslaught.

She charges, Darkheart hums its bloodthirsty lullaby, and a shower of fuschia sparks burst in the air as the beam of the saber cuts through the Supreme Leader’s side. He screams with fury, the walls of the cavern vibrating around them, and dark, seductive pleasure wells in the bond, whether hers or Kylo’s, she can’t tell. There is power in pain, she thinks, as the Supreme Leader turns his power on her and they begin to duel properly.

It’s different, faster and more destructive than sparring with Kylo, but she is strangely calm. The Force – _the Dark side_ – they are with her as she twists and leaps, slices the air. She vaguely feels Kylo’s pride as they attack; senses his smug delight as she taps into the darkness in their bond to strengthen her. Snoke’s face, at first so expressionless and unworried, has become warped with anger, his rheumy eyes holding a hint of fear as he lashes out with a hand, trying to catch her in that chokehold again.

_When two people are bonded… they bleed into eachother’s consciousness… this is how Bastila fell to the Dark Side._

The memory of Luke Skywalker’s voice compels Rey, imbues her with something beyond power as she plumbs the depths of the Force bond, combining her fear and his rage, his hate and her pain, pulling every dark, ugly emotion into her core to catalyze what happens next.

The cavern disappears.

Kylo’s Force signature fades.

There is only Rey, opening herself to the Dark Side.

 

 

 

 

_____________________________

Source for Snoke's trick:

[Doppelgänger Force Power](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Doppleg%C3%A4nger)

 

 


	38. Brethren

The Light inside her has been siphoned off, replaced by a dull whirlpool of darkness. Kylo feels the loss through their linked minds as Rey opens her pretty mouth and _screams_.

The scream takes and transforms every molecule of hate, frustration and sadness in their bond, turning it into a discordant wail that is heart-rending in its emotion and devastating in its effect. Shockwaves ripple through the Force and throughout the cavern, the entire volcano seeming to quail under the strength of the Force scream. Loose rocks begin to roll down the walls like tears, the ground quaking underfoot.

Snoke wobbles, almost falling as the decibels crash over him, and Kylo takes his opportunity, slicing down with the Darksaber, the black blade emitting white sparks as it sinks through the opening in Snoke’s defences and embeds itself in his shoulder. Snoke howls as the beam pierces bone, exits his back, and Kylo pitches forward with the momentum as Snoke thrashes, trying to slide himself off the blade that impales him. For one moment, they sway together in a mockery of a lovers’ dance, and then a jagged crack of lightning whips through the room, throwing both Snoke and Kylo against the wall of the cavern, the Darksaber switching off in midair.

The lightning crackling over their skin is the rich purple of Corellian wine. And it’s coming from Rey.

She stands in the centre of the cavern, balls of ultraviolet energy sparking at her fingertips. Snoke twitches in her direction and she hurls a bolt at him, her raw power terrifying and beautiful to behold. Her eyes are steely with anger as she turns them on Kylo, and he can barely feel her essence in the Force anymore - just a vacuum, dark lensing over light.

 --

_In the shadows, there is power._

_So many remembered phrases, like dark tendrils wrapping round her brainstem, muffling her sense of self. Everything blurs, becoming shapes in a shadow world, and she is so empty. She knew hunger on Jakku, but that was nothing in comparison. The darkness will sate her if she lets it in, it promises. She has flirted with it for so long. The chase is old. Let it nourish her. Let it make her strong._

_No, she cries inside her mind. She won’t let the darkness triumph. No matter how seductive now, it will leave her alone and friendless, like Kylo._

_She is wrought from light and energy as she moves toward master and apprentice. A hand rises of its own accord and she feels the bliss of the current, a tingling rush zipping from heart to arm to fingertips, light blazing from her hands and striking the skeleton in the cape. The great web trembles with him and it’s intoxicating, inflicting this pain on another person. It feeds the void in her, and she throws another bolt of electricity at the dark shapes, their bones lighting up like fireflies in the black room._

_Beautiful._

_\--_

The volts strike him over and over, singeing his nerves and deadening muscles. Kylo can’t move, can’t think – but he can scream.

‘Rey! Rey, _stop_! You’re hurting –‘

Her lightning sears along his skin again, and he cries out through the link, trying to reach what’s left of her, the little Padawan who played with light and is now being consumed by it –

Snoke’s breaths rattle in his throat as Rey channels Kylo’s power, mingles it with her own: torturing the Supreme Leader with endless shocks of the red current.

 --

_The light is comforting, like sinking into warm lakewater; soothing, like floating under her back on an ocean of stars. She can vaguely see two tiny souls pulsating next to her in the immense grid of the Force. She focuses on one of them, the one that bleeds evil in arterial spurts, and channels everything she has into a colossal, boiling thunderbolt that bursts against the walls of the volcano, the ceiling cracking and sagging under the weight of centuries._

 --

Lava begins to bead in the welts Rey’s lightning carved in the ground. The ceiling, already destabilized from the strength of her Force scream, is caving in, rocks tumbling to the cavern floor, creating more holes for the lava to pool in, bright orange and steaming, running in rivulets past his boot.

_Shit, shit, shit. Rey – fuck! – stop it! You’ll bring the whole place down!_

He picks up the Darksaber, stabbing it at Snoke, who has managed to wrest himself free of Rey’s current and is fighting her with every ounce of Force he has. His blue lightning meets her purple, becoming zigzags of midnight energy that bounce off the walls, beginning the avalanche.

‘ _Get out of the way_!’ He yells out the warning, too late, as a boulder drops from the ceiling and smashes Rey and Snoke into the dust. Kylo crumples, screaming voicelessly as the crushing, sympathetic agony hits him, takes his breath away, liquid flooding his lungs. Rey’s legs have snapped under the weight of the rockfall, every pop and fracture duplicated in Kylo as he drags himself over to where she lies, trapped under the rubble, blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.

And then she speaks into his mind and everything aches at her words:

_Leave me behind. You can’t win this alone. Do what you promised._

So this is how hope dies: destroyed by three sentences, heart shattered by a simple scavenger from Jakku.

 _Kylo, go!_ Rey shrieks, her pain scorching his last nerve. _Take the shuttle and fly to Luke. He’s on a planet called Ahch-To; the coordinates are already programmed into the system. And… call Leia. Tell her…_

She lapses into silence, the link between their brains numbing until it burns like frost, like a phantom limb. Tears seep from his eyes as he lowers his mouth to Rey’s, kissing the blood from her lips. The metallic tang of her blood tips him over the edge, and he heaves with sobs as she lays, unresponsive and eerily white beneath the fallen rock.

He reaches out to touch her face, to run his fingers over her skin again – and Rey vanishes. Kylo blinks at the space she’s left behind, her image still imprinted on his retina for a few glaring seconds before that dissolves too.

The boulder rolls precariously over the space where she was previously the fulcrum. Snoke, Kylo notices with a stab of terror, is also gone. He closes his eyes, tries to seek out Rey’s Force signature – she can’t be dead, he’d _know_ \- and after a few heart-stopping seconds he locates that pearly light of hers, zeroes in on it – at the _other side of the planet_.

The coward _teleported_. He took _Rey_ and he teleported. It’s a dark power that Kylo has never mastered – it demands focused and calm intent, and everyone knows how _great_ Kylo Ren is at keeping his intentions calm and focused, let alone the rest of him. Rey especially knows this all too well.

 _Rey_. Hurt and fury blazes in his chest, and his eyes sting with tears he won’t let himself cry. Not now. She’s alive – he can feel her through the Force, and that’s something, Snoke has no idea how strong the bond is now, and with luck he won’t find out. And if she thinks he’s leaving this fucking planet without her, she’s dreaming.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, surrounded by pools of viscous fire, thinking only of her safety. But when the lava scorches the tip of his boot, he knows he has to get out, even if it means leaving his last memory of her to burn.

Kylo gets to his feet and stumbles out of the rock-strewn cavern, hoping the tunnel beyond it hasn’t caved in too. The passageway is still there, and he lets his brain direct his feet on autopilot, merging his consciousness with their link, trying to find any sort of solace in Rey’s lingering Force presence.

It takes him a while to tune in – her mind is a starburst of pain and static, running on a different wavelength to his. There are no coherent thoughts; her white noise blaring into his brain through the conduit, and Kylo begins to understand what Luke Skywalker had told them, of a Force bond eventually driving one or both members to madness. If Rey becomes brain-dead or dies completely, will all he hears be this inert buzz? Will the bond connect them even through the curtain between living and dead? Her pain is his anguish, her sadness his burden as he walks back towards the door cut into the mantle.

Kylo Ren stops a few paces from the outer crust of the volcano, unable to keep walking. He knows - he _knows_ Rey isn’t here anymore, but walking out of the dark cave and into the light of day feels too much like leaving her behind. Snoke has her somewhere on Moraband, somewhere he can’t reach, and the knowledge of that is a knife, a serrated edge twisting deep in his guts.

He swears violently and takes one step out into the rays of Moraband’s sun.

Three figures, clad in silver armour and misshapen steel helmets, are staring up at him from the burnt bedrock below. One is Phasma, recognizable by her characteristic bucketlike helm and her general’s sash. The other two are Chriali and Jabra, the fourth and fifth Knights of Ren. Chriali holds a mace, complete with toxin-tipped spikes, and Jabra has his grenade-launcher hitched onto his shoulder.

‘Kylo Ren,’ Phasma calls out, her clipped mechanical voice like a firing squad. ‘You are coming with us. Don’t attempt to resist.’

Kylo laughs behind the mask, the sound distorted into a mess of static by the voice-changer. Darkness, his old friend, bubbles up like the freed lava, and he slips without a word into the hatefulness that’s always a second away from overtaking him.

‘The Supreme Leader gave orders to take you alive. But he didn’t specify to what degree. You remember what we used to do to our captives on those long journeys to Arkanis, surely?’ Chriali taunts, spinning her mace in one armoured hand.

‘Oh, I remember,’ Kylo replies, angling the Darksaber as he walks forward. ‘But you’re fucked if you think you’re anything but target practice.’

‘Trash talk didn’t save that Nikto you brutalized on Gamorr, and it won’t save you,’ Jabra snaps, the grenade-launcher whistling as he primes it, seconds away from firing.

Kylo reaches into the chasm within, pulling dark power around himself like a shield, and throws a hand toward Jabra, who staggers and falls, landing on the mouth of the grenade-launcher, which explodes in a vivid tongue of green flame. He can’t hold back a bark of laughter at the convenience of it as Chriali rushes him, swinging the mace like a cavewoman as she engages him. She has brute strength, he remembers from their shared training sessions, but little finesse. He deftly dodges her attacks, keeping an eye on General Phasma, who hasn’t made a move, preferring to let his former underlings do her dirty work.

Kylo coughs as Chriali deals him a stunning blow to the solar plexus – luckily with the butt of her stick, rather than the spiked ball at the tip. Blood roars in his ears as he twists behind her, aiming a kick at her unprotected knee-joints that sends her tumbling to the ground. She has enough sense to throw out her hands as she falls, avoiding being punctured by her own mace, and that gives him the opportunity he needs. He drives the Darksaber through her back-plate, watching her die with detached amusement. He’s _missed_ this, the electric thrill of bloodletting, of killing without consulting his conscience because Rey thinks anything can be resolved with a kind word and a bat of her eyelashes.

He suspects Phasma will be harder to beat. He’s trained with the Knights of Ren for years, knows their fighting styles and weak spots inside out. He’s never traded blows with the former captain of the Stormtroopers. She walks towards him with complete conviction in her victory, and anticipation churns in his stomach as she pulls an enormous blaster from her belt, discharging it from a foot away.

He catches the plasma slug with extreme effort, letting it hover a moment before flicking it back towards her, where it reflects like a light ray off her chrome shell. He can’t do that again, and he dodges her next shot before flying forward to cut at the strip of unguarded flesh between her shoulderplate and her helmet.

He scores a deep burn across Phasma’s collar, and she lets out a metallic gasp. She hits Ren hard in the chest with the muzzle of the blaster, knocking him back a few paces before she can fire again, pointing straight at his heart. He stops the bolt a second before it impacts, orange energy shimmering directly over his torso before he casts it aside with a grunt of exertion.

His strength is waning, and she knows it as she fires off a round of smaller bolts, which he deflects with the Darksaber, arcing them back towards her. One beam bursts on the nose of the blaster, shooting off the entire barrel and leaving Phasma holding the butt of the gun and nothing else. She drops it as Kylo points the Darksaber at her breastplate in warning.

‘Yield,’ he grits out from beneath the mask, and she sinks to her knees on the melted rock.

‘You’re a disgrace, Kylo Ren,’ the general spits, wrenching off her Stormtrooper helmet and fixing him with pale, ice blue eyes. ‘You’ve just murdered two of the members of your brethren. You killed Hux in cold blood. You’ve tried to bring down the Order that took you in when your family abandoned you. And you’ve done it all for a sniff of Resistance cunt. You’re _exactly_ like your criminal father.’

His eyes mist with red at the mention of Han Solo. ‘Don’t you ever, _ever_ speak of him again,’ he snarls. And before he can second-guess it, he stabs the tip of his saber into her open mouth. The general’s scream is bloodcurdlingly awful as the plasma burns through the roof of her mouth, teeth warping in the heat as her tongue blackens and curls into dust. Her throat seems to glow on the inside as the blade showers flaming sparks in her mouth.

Kylo switches off the Darksaber, and Phasma’s eyes flash white as she faints. His temper got the best of him again. He doesn’t give a flying fuck. At least he spared her life – Rey would be proud.

Battling the Knights of Ren has wasted precious time, and Kylo formulates a plan as he sprints back across the lava field to the corvette, which is miraculously intact. He sees why once he boards the shuttle and checks the controls: Rey had left the cloaking device switched on, the handy stygium crystals making the shuttle invisible to the naked eye. He slides into the cockpit and tries to figure out what to do: there are so many buttons and knobs. How is he supposed to fly this chunk of metal? Han Solo never had time to teach him, and he’d never bothered to learn, believing that honing his Force powers was more important.

He presses a few different buttons, none of them causing more than a shudder underneath his seat. He fiddles with the levers and the holo-screens, but he can’t change the coordinates Rey’s preset into the system. _Fuck_.

 _Finally_ , the engine whirs to life after he punches a red rectangle on the dashboard that has ‘ **AUTOPILOT’** printed on it. The corvette oscillates as it begins to rise, and he clings to the lever that controls the speed – about the only thing he can control in this vessel. Rey had obviously relied on his piloting ignorance when she’d programmed the ship – the navigational system is taking him straight to Luke Skywalker, and he can’t do a goddamn thing about it.

_You win, Rey. I’m going to Skywalker. Happy?_

There’s a small stirring in the link - a fuzzy, sedated acknowledgement of his words. Rey is alive, for what purpose he doesn’t know, but she’s being healed and kept alive.

Kylo rests his head in his hands and sobs with relief.

 

 


	39. Compromises

Predictably, he loses control several times over the course of the long flight to Ahch-To. The first night, Kylo lies down in the crew cabin and stares at the ceiling, picturing every gorgeous detail of Rey’s body, thinking of the first and last times they fucked, and has to destroy the cot before any more memories can leak through. He sleeps in the pilot’s seat after that, in those brief spells between his worried wakefulness. Sometimes he gets a sleepy thought or two from Rey, through the bond: she’s being restrained somewhere, medicine and analgesics being dripped into her veins, but she’s comforted to know that he’s going to Ahch-To. There’s something she wants him to do, but he can’t get the gist of her jumbled-up thoughts and it incenses him to the point of violence more than once.

There are a few hair-raising moments too, where he has to teach himself, with no small amount of far-seeing to avoid the catastrophic outcomes, to steer the shuttle – Rey had programmed Ahch-To’s coordinates and the autopilot function to get the ship there, but not the jumps it would need to make in and out of hyperspace. The shuttle jolts in and out of the blue ether as he makes random jumps between channels, but he manages to avoid speeding into any black holes or suns in the vicinity, so that’s an achievement.

Constellations smash into silver streaks outside the cockpit window when he sends the shuttle into lightspeed, and the view is pretty enough to distract him for a few minutes before he remembers all the shit that’s happened in the past few weeks and has to hit something.

At last, after nine hours of alternating tension and boredom, the comm-system beeps to let him know he’s approaching Ahch-To. There’s no air traffic control to request permission to land, or to direct him to a hangar, so he awkwardly maneuvers the ship out of hyperspace and into low-speed as he breaks atmo on the little marine planet. _So this is where Skywalker hid for all these years. How quaint._

Rey trusts him with Luke’s best-kept secret, and he holds that trust like an orb of light, golden and luminous, next to his heart. It was hard-won, her trust, but it’s here and it’s _his_ , and he holds onto that as he flies lower, scanning the islands for any familiar landmarks. Phantom pain flares low in his belly – Snoke, or his minions, are doing something to Rey, fixing internal damage while she’s under anaesthetic. Unfortunately, he’s not, and he feels a lesser echo of everything they do.

A flash of white catches his eye, standing out sharply against the endless expanse of jewel-bright green and blue. It looks like a disc of white plastic from above, but he’d recognise that old relic anywhere. Apparently Chewbacca has managed to get it back into some semblance of working order.

Ren inexpertly angles the little corvette onto a patch of dry land next to the _Falcon_ , touching down with an ungainly thump that nearly throws him out of the pilot’s seat

A beige-robed figure hurries up a flight of stone steps as Kylo lowers the ramp of the shuttle and staggers out. Skywalker is here, just as Rey promised, and he’s not alone. Chewbacca follows close behind, letting out a mellow growl in greeting.

‘Hello,’ Ren says curtly, before turning to Luke and blurting out, ‘Snoke has Rey. You have to help.’

Luke just stares at him, and the expression of deep _loss_ on his face is too much, coupled with the pain that erupts as something cuts into Rey’s spleen on the other side of the galaxy.

Everything blacks out.

 --

He wakes up on a couch inside the stone temple, a fire reduced to glowing coals in the grate before him. Someone’s covered him with a blanket and put a bucket next to the couch. He sits up gingerly, in case the lancing pain returns, but he’s as good as new, so presumably Rey is too. At least Snoke has the heart to fix her injuries before using her for whatever fucked-up purpose he chooses.

He drags himself off the couch and into the kitchen area, where Luke and Chewbacca are writing a conversation on a sheet of paper because Luke can’t understand spoken Shyriiwook.

‘I need to speak to General Organa,’ Kylo announces without preamble. ‘Do you have a line on her?’

Luke looks up from the sheet of paper. ‘Of course. Now she knows where I live, she won’t leave me alone. But the last time we communicated, she was headed to Coruscant for a diplomatic mission. She won’t be back for a while.’

‘ _Fuck_ that,’ he swears viciously. ‘We have to get hold of her. Tell her to mobilize every last man in the Resistance and wipe Snoke the fuck out. _He has Rey_. I felt him hurt her.’

‘Sit down, Ben, and then we’ll talk,’ Luke says calmly, gesturing to a chair on the other side of the rustic little table. Kylo’s ready to tear the Jedi to shreds, but Chewie growls a warning and despite everything, the knight yanks out the chair and sits.

‘We don’t have time to _talk_ , Skywalker,’ he spits. ‘Rey is being held captive by Snoke. He’ll kill her out of spite once he realizes that we – that I-‘ he stumbles on the words, unable to own up to what he feels, as usual.

‘You love her,’ Skywalker sums up for him, an odd look in his eyes. ‘I already knew that, of course. But it is strange to hear you admit to it.’

‘I didn’t,’ Kylo mutters, staring at his hands as a feverish anger swirls beneath the surface. He’s furious, full of loathing – but it’s directed inward now. He _is_ weak, just like the Revan hologram had said – he failed to overtake his master. Rey had almost managed to, with her Force scream and her lightning – her powers far outstrip his own. All he’d been able to do was poke ineffectively with the Darksaber – what happened to the _Darkshears_ , or the Force blasts he used to be capable of conjuring without a thought? Being in Snoke’s presence had utterly disabled him. ‘It doesn’t matter how I feel about Rey, because she’s going to be worse than dead if we don’t get on a ship _right now_ and go rescue her from him.’

Luke doesn’t speak, so Kylo continues recklessly, ‘ _You_ were the one that begged me to go to Moraband with Rey. Now it’s time to return the favour. At least let me talk to the General, Uncle. _Please_.’

Chewie lets out a soft whicker, and Luke seems to be mulling it over, blissfully unaware of how Kylo’s fists curl on the tabletop, itching to punch his uncle in his stupid face.

‘All right,’ Luke says at last, getting up and retrieving something from a shelf in the corner of the kitchen. ‘But, Ben? Maybe call her _Mom_ , for once, not _General_. Make her day.’

Kylo scowls as Luke places the holopad in front of him. The sleek little device looks out of place in the bucolic little temple, so Kylo takes it outside, sitting down on the stone stairs and keying in the passcode Luke dictates to him, dialing Leia’s private line.

There’s a click and a blur of pixilation, then his mother’s lined face fills the screen, her eyes sparkling with laughter before she sees who is at the other end and her exuberance dims, which makes Kylo’s pulse skyrocket with a fresh jab of anger. It’s the same old cycle of antipathy that it always was with them.

‘Ben?’ she exclaims, her voice full of surprise and worry. ‘What are you doing on Luke’s holopad? Is that the _temple_ I see in the background? Where’s Rey? Are you both okay?’

‘No. Rey isn’t,’ he forces out, trying to keep his tone civil. ‘Gen- _Mother_ ,’ he corrects himself, using the hated moniker if only to appease Skywalker, ‘I need your help.’

\-- 

Pink blossoms fall against the translucent glass ceiling of the newly built medical bay, and a pair of med-droids step back respectfully as a chrome-armoured Stormtrooper clanks into the room.

‘Report,’ a computerized voice orders, and the two droids start to rattle off a list of the patient’s vital signs.

‘We used bone-deep kolto injections to repair her femurs and one vertebral disk. The damage to her internal organs was fixed using a regimen of standard surgery and bacta supplements, and-‘

‘That will be all.’ The Stormtrooper waves a hand and the droids whir out of the room, leaving the trooper standing at the bedside of a young woman, encased in bandages, the tube of her breathing mask twisted around her neck like a noose. As the trooper pushes a button on the machine next to her, the girl’s eyes blink open, a lustrous hazel that reflects the metal armour as she takes in her guardian.

‘Where am I, Phasma?’ her voice rasps past the breathing tube.

‘The new First Order base on Felucia. Feel free to relay that to your lover.’ Phasma’s original, clipped Coruscanti accent is missing – replaced by a computerized drone not unlike that of the med-droids before.

‘I’ll be sure to do that.’ Rey slides down the bed, resting her head on the pillow and coughing a little as the plastic tube scrapes her oesophagus. ‘Can you take this thing out?’

Phasma inclines her helmet. ‘Certainly. I think I have the greater need.’

‘What-‘

Phasma removes the helmet. Where her lips should be is an oily, glistening hole, her lips shriveled and burnt back from the ruin of her mouth and throat. It’s blackened and burned and she spits flecks of gore when she laughs.

Rey screams.

 --

‘How can you just expect us to trust your word, Ben? How are we supposed to know that this isn’t some kind of elaborate scheme to lure the Resistance into another bloodbath like Felucia?’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Kylo grinds out. ‘Do you think I would have willingly flown to this _rock_ if the situation wasn’t desperate? **Snoke. Has. Rey.** She’s a “valued member of the Resistance” – your words, not mine. So _help_ me rescue her the way you did when I was the one who held her captive. Take your ships and your men and bomb the shit out of wherever he is.’

‘And where _is_ he, Ben?’ Leia says sharply, her gaze drilling into him through the holopad’s screen. ‘How do you propose to find Snoke in a few _hours_ when I’ve been personally trying to find him for twenty years with no luck?’

‘The Force bond, Farseeing, I don’t know!’ Kylo rakes a hand through his hair in frustration, almost dropping the holopad. ‘If you uphold your end, I’ll do my part, Mother. Just help me save Rey, before Snoke does more damage. He’s already hurt her, I felt it, and I-‘ his voice breaks, and a few tears escape, rolling down his cheeks and landing on the holopad.

Leia stares out of the screen, blinking in shock as her son breaks down in front of her. A mixture of anger and grief crosses her face, but she makes her voice gentle. ‘Hey. Ben.’

He doesn’t look at her, focusing instead on the birds that wheel through the clear sky overhead, squinting through the water in his eyes.

‘Answer me one thing. Do you love her?’

He sniffles a little as he replies, ‘I don’t see how that has any relevance to the conversation.’

‘It’s a simple yes or no answer, Ben.’

‘All right, _yes_. I love her. I’m in love with Rey. Why does it matter?’ he growls.

‘Because if you love her, nothing anyone does or says will stop you from racing half-cocked across the galaxy to rescue her,’ Leia affirms, her eyes full of a soft, sentimental brilliance. ‘I did the same for your father in Hutt Space once. So I guess we’d better help you, if only to avoid another disastrous mission. What do you need?’

‘Everything. Pilots, fighters, cannons – we were stupid to try to take him on without an army behind us.’

‘You need an army, you’ve got one. It would be more impressive if we had the Republic Fleet, but…’ she trails off, and Ren cringes at the memory of the Hosnian planets breaking into chunks of galactic matter in front of his eyes. ‘I can rustle up an approximation. I’ll put out some feelers on Snoke’s location, and I’ll send a pilot to Ahch-To to retrieve you.’

‘Thank you very much,’ he says formally, ‘but I already have a ship. Chewbacca’s here – he fixed the _Falcon_ , he can fly us both to a neutral location.’

‘So, you flew another starship, by yourself, to Ahch-To?’ Leia surmises, her incredulous tone plucking at his temper.

‘In a manner of speaking. Rey had already pre-programmed everything, I just pressed some buttons.’

‘Well, colour me impressed. In that case, we’ll rendezvous on Coruscant in two days, or however fast you can get here. I’ll request a few pilots and try to assemble the rest of the troops from here. The New Republic already has a warrant out for your arrest, so we’ll have to keep it covert. When you get in range of the traffic towers, use the callsign _Cloudshape_. They’ll think you’re with my entourage. And for heaven’s sake, disguise yourself – just not with that awful mask.’

‘All right,’ he agrees, moving out of the frame to disconnect the call, but guilt brews in his stomach – she’s _helping_ him, she deserves more than an abrupt hang-up - and he awkwardly picks up the holopad again. ‘And Leia? Thanks.’

Leia grins wickedly at him, and he can see a hint of the rebellious woman Han Solo fell so hard for, once upon a time. ‘Don’t thank me yet. You still have to bluff your way into Coruscant’s airspace. Good luck.’

 

 


	40. War Games

_History repeats itself._

She’s restrained in an upright chair; analogous to the one Kylo had held her in during the Starkiller interrogation. But that’s where the similarities end. The figure in the corner of the room isn’t masked, but she wishes he were as a weak light illuminates the eroded, scarred skin of his face, the malignant gleam of his eyes. The Supreme Leader.

Snoke reeks of decay as he shuffles towards her; that same, bloated _rot_ she had smelt in the cavern on Moraband, and her stomach flips. She cranes her neck, eyes combing the shadows of the room for someone, _anyone_ to look at other than this ghoulish nightmare of a man.

Snoke circles her chair like a shark, feasting on the fear that emanates from her. ‘Look at me, filth,’ he says, his voice silky-smooth. ‘Come now, Rey, we must mind our manners when in the presence of our betters.’

‘You are _not_ my better,’ she snarls, struggling against the restraints. ‘You’re nothing, you’re a ghost-’

‘Be careful how you address me. This will be painful no matter the way you behave, but the degree of pain is flexible.’ Snoke slips a hand into his robes and extracts a thin, flute-like silver instrument. ‘I doubt you know what this is, and I don’t intend to educate you in the art of torture. Suffice it to say this is a kind of mind-probe, and it will break you in every way imaginable. So before we begin, I’ll give you one chance to submit to me willingly. You have shown yourself to be a worthy apprentice, far surpassing the traitor Kylo Ren. Swear fealty to me now, Rey, and you will leave this room unscathed.’

Rey leans forward in the chair. ‘You know, you were scarier as a hologram,’ she says conspiratorially. ‘It’s probably something to do with height. Did you have to stand on a stool when you were bossing Phasma around, or-‘

A stunning backhand rocks her head back against the chair, flecks of light spinning before her eyes. Tears smart in her eyes as her face lights up with the pain.

Snoke smiles grimly, raising the instrument and bringing it to the corner of her eye, the metal tip pricking her tear duct. ‘I hope that was worth it. Unendurable torment it is, then.’

He slides the instrument through her eye socket, and her awareness shatters, her head splitting with brilliant, white flashes of heat and agony.

 --

There’s a crash and a piercing cry, and Chewie runs out of the _Falcon_ ’s cockpit to find Kylo contorted into a sobbing ball on the floor of the crew cabin, hands white-knuckling his head as he screams again, high and agonized and strangely childlike.

Chewie nudges him with a paw, and when the boy rolls over, his eyes are bloodshot and filmed with tears. ‘Snoke’s torturing her. I felt it, he-‘ Kylo cuts himself off with another scream, curling into the foetal position, every vein on his forehead standing out, stark blue contrasting against his pallid skin.

Chewie roars, trying to communicate to him that they’re only a half hour from Coruscant, and Kylo needs to keep it together and get them through the airspace barrier without being fired on by Coruscant’s security. Despite his terrible grasp of Shyriiwook, Kylo gets the gist and sits up, taking in gulps of air, rubbing his forehead. A faint echo of Rey’s agony ricochets through his skull, and the bond between them darkens, swirls with her suffering.

‘ _Fuck_ ,’ he whispers shakily. ‘ _No_!’ He leaps up suddenly, sprinting towards the cockpit, Chewie close on his heels. Kylo grabs the steering lever and wrenches it down so roughly that the handle snaps off, and he chucks it across the room with a bellow of frustration. ‘We have to do something, _now_! We don’t have time for this political bullshit when Snoke’s hurting her!’

Chewie grips Kylo’s shoulder, stopping him from doing further damage to the dashboard. He growls a question, and Kylo twists round to glare up at the Wookiee’s hairy face. ‘I don’t have a fucking clue what you just said.’

Chewie roars.

‘Shut it.’ Kylo shrugs off Chewie’s paw, stomping into the seating area as the Wookiee resumes his post at the cockpit, maneuvring the freighter through the dense field of stars at the Deep Core, gravity distorting the hyperspace channel as they speed toward Coruscant. He’s worried for Kylo, and he tries not to let that anxiety bleed into his piloting ability – losing control and careening into a dead star isn’t going to help anybody.

Kylo returns in time to hoodwink the air traffic control, speaking the codeword Leia had given them, and they’re directed to a hangar bay on Level 4986. They glide between clusters of spacescrapers, moving with the flow of the skylane, smog floating like ash-clouds above the cosmopolitan sprawl. It’s the city of his childhood, but it doesn’t feel like home. No place in the universe does.

They disembark in the starship bay and are met by two of Leia’s lackeys, who escort them on foot to the Republic military base, which is a couple of levels CoCo Town, another uncomfortable reminder of his youth: the dark energy he felt as a child still radiates from behind neon storefronts and dilapidated industrial sheds.

They come into the foyer of the Galactic Senate, where Leia waits for them, looking energetic, more refreshed than Kylo had seen her on Lothal weeks ago. Maintaining a distance from him is good for her health. She holds out a hand to shake, but when he takes it, she mutters a low ‘ _screw it’_ and pulls him into a hug, folding her arms tightly round him. Kylo jerks, surprised, in her grip.

‘Mother,’ he says awkwardly, a note of panic in his voice. She releases him, and he shifts from foot to foot, unsure what the protocol is here.

‘I think we can dispense with the hostility, Ben,’ Leia says, rolling her eyes. ‘We’re on the same side now, after all. Where’s Luke?’

Kylo snorts, remembering the Jedi for the first time in two days. ‘Coward couldn’t be parted from his precious rock collection.’

They’d tried, both Kylo and Chewie, to convince Luke to accompany them to Coruscant. After all, they’d reasoned, he’d made the trip to Lothal for Rey, and the situation wasn’t half as bad back then. Even Kylo’s proclamation that they’re now _technically_ _at war_ wasn’t enough to incite the old man to join them. Luke had calmly repeated that he had his own reasons for staying, and Kylo wasn’t about to get down on his knees and beg. The hermit was probably terrified of Snoke, rightly so, and now that the stakes are high enough to involve him, he’d taken a backseat. _Whatever_. They’d left the corvette behind, so the old fool is free to gallivant off to all the other islands on Ahch-To he hasn’t investigated yet.

Leia seems to understand all that from Kylo’s expression of contempt, and she nods, resigned. ‘Well, I’ve upheld my end as promised. I’ll take you up to the briefing rooms and we can talk tactics. There are a few familiar faces, so be warned.’

‘Great,’ Kylo demurs, and they head up a flight of off-white marble stairs, passing whitewashed walls and doors painted cream – of course, everything has to be pure and _white_ for the Jedi, how could he forget? Leia opens the door to the conference room and Kylo finds himself face to face with FN-2187, and the Resistance pilot Ren had left bloodied and bruised in the chambers of the _Finalizer_. Rey’s friends.

‘What the f-‘ he snaps, spinning round to his mother, who’s stifling a laugh.

‘They’re here to help,’ she assures him, as if that makes a jot of difference. Kylo’s ears flame with mortification as the rogue Stormtrooper gets up and strides confidently around the table, no longer subordinate. He stops in front of Kylo, and then extends a hand. Kylo stares at him.

FN-2187 sighs. ‘Look, man. I’m not your biggest fan, but Rey trusts you. And you left the First Order, too, so props for that. We’re both traitors now.’ His eyes glint, steely with resolve. ‘And I want to rescue Rey just as much as you do.’

A dagger of jealousy twists in Kylo’s guts at Finn’s words. The petty kinship the Stormtrooper has with Rey is an infinitesimal _drop_ in the ocean compared to their Force bond, to what they’ve been through. Unless – does the traitor have _feelings_ for her?

He’s still holding out a hand, and Kylo’s tempted to just light the Darksaber and slice it off. But he has to at least make an effort until Rey’s safe, so he takes the Stormtrooper’s peace offering, gripping his hand for a split second. The bare-skinned contact is enough to get brief flashes of the former Stormtrooper’s thoughts if Kylo focuses: he’s hesitant to meet his enemy, but firm in following orders from the General; he loves the scavenger, but in the way a brother adores his spirited little sister; his feelings for the pilot behind him, the man who gave him his name, _Finn_ , are much more romantic – Kylo drops Finn’s hand like it’s a branding iron.

‘You promised me an army, not one defector and a Resistance pilot,’ Ren growls at the General, who purses her lips.

‘A taskforce takes time to assemble, Ben. Days, yet.’

‘We don’t _have_ days!’ he erupts, and Finn backs away from him quickly. ‘Snoke is torturing Rey _now_!’

‘But he won’t kill her,’ Leia says evenly. ‘She’s too valuable to him, both as bait for you and as a Force user in her own right. If I know anything about that monster, it’s that he’s cunning, not irrational or impulsive. He’s not going to spill the blood of a Force sensitive unless he needs to.’

‘How can you be so _cold_ about this?’ Kylo says incredulously. ‘This isn’t some fucking military stratagem. This is _Rey_.’

‘Yes, and if there’s one thing I know about Rey, it’s that she can take care of herself,’ Leia counters, giving Kylo a blazing look. ‘And if you’ll stop making a _scene_ , we’ll talk with Poe and Finn about how best to plot an assault.’

Kylo stares at her, open-mouthed, but he sits. Poe starts to outline his flight plan, Finn chiming in from time to time with added assault strategies.

Every couple of minutes, weak electric currents shiver through the link, echoes of Rey’s suffering on the other side of the galaxy. Leia notices Kylo’s white-knuckling the corner of the table until it dents, but doesn’t comment.

 --

Black streams of energy shrivel every neuron and glia, grey matter lit with burning sparks of electricity as Snoke funnels his lightning through the conductor rod, into her brain. She can’t stop her limbs from jerking like a paper doll’s, or the blood that trickles out of her eyes and ears, wetting the metal underneath her head. Snoke keeps it up for hours, until there’s no energy left in him to use, and only then does he remove the rod.

‘I wouldn’t have to hurt you if you’d join me, Rey. What has the Light ever done for you? Did it feed you, those nights you almost died from starvation on Jakku? Was it the Light that lent you strength, the night you faced Kylo Ren in the snow? Did it keep you safe from me? Search your thoughts – the truth is already there. It was Darkness that surrounded you, Darkness that gave you the power to near-destroy me. The dormant Force in you is neither dark nor light – it is _all_. Reconsider.’

Rey pants heavily, looking at Snoke with revulsion. ‘ _Fuck_ you. I won’t let you corrupt me.’

Snoke bends close to her, his withered lips peeling back from his teeth in a grotesque snarl. ‘Not _yet_.’

He strides to the other side of the torture chamber to choose a new instrument, and Rey wilts in the chair, the metal cuffs chafing uncomfortably at her skin. Her head’s full of bees, stinging and stinging, but she uses the seconds of respite to lapse into catatonia, using every reserve of Light to make one last, unconscious Force _sending_ , a bridge across the stars.

 --

It’s past midnight, and the relentless gush of starship traffic outside his window is beginning to slow. He’d been sitting next to the window of his hotel room, meditating, for hours, the way Skywalker used to when he visited Leia’s apartment all those years ago. The sting of neon has begun to hurt his tired eyes, so he gives up and goes to bed.

The expanse of the mattress is unnecessary for a person even of his height, and it’s yet another cruel reminder that Rey is missing. She’s never been to Coruscant, as far as he knows – the screaming neon, the haze of pollution, the endless stream of starships, everything he hates about the Galactic City, she would have been fascinated by.

_Kylo has just drifted off when she comes to him, resplendent in sky-coloured satin, sapphires studding her neckline, brown hair loose around her shoulders. She is a delirium, a fever dream. Rey would never look like this, dress like this._

_He knows he’s dreaming, but he still enjoys the sight of satin slipping as it puddles at her feet; relishes the velvet of her skin as she slides between the sheets; worships her delectable little mouth as she drops a trail of fiery kisses down his sternum. It’s a special kind of torture, this vision of her, and he groans as she sinks onto him, the pulsing of her light like the core of a star. Rey radiates warmth as she moves atop him, making his eyes dampen with tears, knowing none of this is real._

_‘Where are you, Rey?’ he breathes, and the dreamscape shatters and reforms around their tangled bodies, the Coruscant smog replaced by drifting pink blossoms, spores of the Maralii tree. A glowing seed floats onto the crown of her head and blooms there, silver threads of light weaving through her hair, down the skin of her arms, twining round their joined hands like a promise._

And then she’s gone, relegated to a glittering presence at the back of his brain as he wakes up. But he has the answer he needs, and Kylo tumbles out of the bed, running out of his hotel room and across the hallway to Chewbacca’s room, hammering on the door until the Wookiee opens it.

‘Felucia. That’s where Rey is. A First Order facility on Felucia.’

Chewie’s roar is a call to arms, a trumpeting triumph.

 


	41. Alchemy

A jet of freezing water hits her directly in the face, and Rey shrieks, inhaling a lungful of icy liquid. A bucket clangs as someone throws it to the floor, somewhere off to the side of the room.

‘Are you tiring of this yet?’ Snoke’s hoarse voice settles in her ears as she coughs and splutters, foam flying from her lips. ‘I’m impressed, Rey of Jakku. It’s been four moons, and you still resist. But physical pain is only the first step. Onto the next.’

His mutilated face looms at the corner of her eye, and he spreads one paper-skinned hand like a web over her eyes and nose, nails digging hard into the skin of her cheeks. His hand is blocking her nostrils, and when she opens her mouth to breathe, Snoke hooks some kind of contraption past her lips and wrenches her mouth open, propping her jaw up on metal struts as he takes a little vial from the folds of his cloak.

Rey eyes the contents of the clear vial – a gelatinous electric blue slime that sticks to the sides of the glass, leaving glistening smears. Disgusting, fascinating. ‘What is it?’ she garbles the words, unable to close her mouth.

‘This? This is _alchemy_ , Rey, in its purest form. Chemicals such as these are highly sought after in black market trade, all the way from the Core Worlds to the red gas giants.’ He decants the vial into her open mouth, squeezing her neck in case she tries to bring up the thick fluid. He holds her until the muscles of her throat relax, then continues pleasantly, ‘It is _Sith poison_ , infused with the power of the Dark side. Once ingested, it acts like a virus – it invades one’s cells, makes one more _suggestible_ to the pull of the Dark, and in the duration of a day, if we are lucky… the Dark will consume your light, and I will possess you.’

Rey gags as the Sith venom dissolves, heavy and peaty on her tongue. Snoke waits until it takes effect, laughing at her as Rey starts to whimper, the poison oozing like battery acid in her veins, pain shearing through her belly like blades of a scimitar. She heaves, and blood speckles the front of her shirt, glosses her lips with red.

‘Oh, yes, I should have warned you. The poison will cause unquantifiable mental and physical pain while it purges your body of the Light,’ Snoke purrs, removing the device from her mouth and letting her head flop against the restraining rig. ‘Your molecular makeup will change, as the poison feeds on your anger – of which you have much, Rey of Jakku. You would not have fought me so fiercely if you were some timid little desert flower. Every ounce of hatred you harbour will make you more my servant, weakening your willpower until you are ready to be mine….’

She tracks him with her eyes as he circles her chair, but a white heat flares in her brain and she cries out again as the pain intensifies, becoming ravenous: a Rancor chewing through her ribs, tangling its teeth in her heartstrings. The whiteness burns out her vision, replaced with a vacuum of dark negativity that sucks out every sense except her hearing, so that Snoke can torment her more.

‘Think of it this way, Rey: the pain, the darkness, is your cocoon - you are the caterpillar. There is pain in becoming. And you _will_ become.’ He taps his temple with a skeletal finger, and he exits the room, leaving Rey to asphyxiate on the darkness that suffuses every cell.

 --

‘The recon team’s given us a new report.’ Leia opens the conference, looking around the little room, where Poe and Finn sit nibbling on cookies brought from the diner in CoCo Town; where Chewbacca polishes his bowcaster; and where her son paces restlessly from window to wall, looking rather scruffy in rumpled black clothes and worry-knotted hair. ‘The First Order have built a training facility on Felucia, as we guessed weeks ago. It’s been hastily made, obviously to recoup from their loss of Starkiller, and more recently the Dahlia space station. Based on an analyst’s appraisal of the complex, it looks like a significant portion of the base is dedicated to conditioning future Stormtroopers.’

She glances across at Finn as she says this. He’s shrunk in his seat, putting down his half-eaten cookie. A revolted expression crosses his face, obviously remembering his own conditioning sessions with the First Order. Poe rubs his shoulder comfortingly and turns to the General. ‘Do you have a lock on Rey?’

The General cuts her eyes to where Ben paces. ‘That’s the easy part. Once we bring Ben to ground zero, the bond between them should be able to lead him precisely to where Rey is. It’s getting off Felucia again that will be difficult. We’re going to need a whole lot more than a few X-wings.’

‘What’s the deal with the Republic fleet?’

‘They’re out, pure and simple. This is strictly a rebel operation.’

Poe’s brow furrows, tallying up the Resistance’s manpower versus that of the First Order. ‘So, basically, the New Republic told us to go fuck ourselves. And die.’

‘Not exactly,’ Leia shifts in her seat. ‘They aren’t exactly aware of what we plan to do.’

‘General!’ Poe gasps, feigning dismay. ‘You didn’t tell them? That’s a breach of your contract as a military overseer.’

‘Contracts don’t apply here,’ Leia says, an edge in her voice that dares any of them to challenge her. ‘This is Rey we’re talking about, held hostage by the monster who corrupted and stole my child from me.’

‘Can we _please_ ,’ Ben bridles, as she knew he would, ‘for _one_ conversation, not allude to my traumatic childhood?’

Leia gives him a searching look, but steers the subject back onto its correct track. ‘In any case, we have something better than an armada.’

‘ _What_?’ Finn asks skeptically, and they’re all interrupted by the sound of someone’s throat clearing.

Everybody’s eyes fly like metal filings to the magnet of Luke Skywalker, who stands awkwardly in the doorway, his salt-and-pepper hair trimmed so it no longer hangs haphazardly over his eyebrows. Said eyebrows are pulled together in a fierce frown, his gaze fixed on his twin sister’s upturned face.

A ripple of genuine shock passes through the room. Poe, wisecracking artist that he is, is the first to speak up.

‘We’ve got a Jedi,’ he smiles widely, his dark eyes dancing. ‘Nice!’

Leia blushes under Luke’s cool stare. ‘I… actually, I was talking about Ben,’ she clarifies, and then stands up to hug her brother. He murmurs something to her, too low for the rest of them to pick up. Whatever he’s said, Leia seems to grow six inches, right there in the conference room, and she turns back to Finn, Poe and Kylo, who are watching the twins expectantly.

Luke’s eyes flicker to Kylo, and there’s a hint of warmth in his cool blues. ‘It was a good call, leaving the corvette behind.’

‘We bounce at 0600,’ Leia affirms, her careworn face splitting in a grin. ‘ _And_ we’ve got a Jedi.’

\-- 

_Killing. Eviscerating everyone who’s ever hurt her, persecuted her, violated her. Mashing their bones into pulp under her boot._

These are the violent delights that Rey feeds herself on. Her anger grows with each passing moment – fury with Snoke, for torturing and poisoning her; rage at Kylo, for leaving her here to rot; anger at Luke Skywalker, for lying to her, for making her believe she was powerful, part of an ageless prophecy. She’s not – she’s nothing. If she were really destined to be the next Jedi Knight, she’d be able to combat the awful effects of this toxin as it fills her bloodstream, saturates her thoughts with passion and viciousness.

 _In the shadows, there is power_. She’s colourblind, only seeing dull red tones in the room she knows is black – a demonic shadow, the colour of old rust, coalesces at the corner of her vision, whispering to her that she can still be _powerful_ , just in a different way. The Dark was _always_ inside her; it wheedles, just overcast by her stubborn Light. It can show her, now that the light’s expunged, her new self. _To own you, I must break you._

The demon places a clammy hand on her face and she is lost. It’s only been a month since the Supreme Leader had forced his essence inside her mind, picking through her thoughts like fine chocolates, but nothing prepares her for the earth-shattering agony that his entry brings: her mind is splitting apart at the hemispheres, cranium rupturing as it fails to contain all the raw power, the razor-sharpness of his Force possession. His spirit overflows its vessel as he crams himself into her, taking root in her soul, and blood oozes from her ears and eyes as her body unconsciously fights the transfer.

After seconds of excruciating, calamitous agony, she stops struggling, her body giving up, her skull resigning itself to hosting this new evil. Snoke’s presence tugs insistently at her mind as it leads her through the septic whorls of her brain – in the same way she explored Kylo Ren’s, through their link, once a time, she gets new insight into her own.

_Visions of slaughtered enemies, of sacrificial lambs, of unlimited power and rage, that rage she holds onto so fearfully, lest it take her down the path to the dark side, irresistible, irreversible. But there is beauty, here in the blackness. Love and hate are bedfellows on the Dark side. She can have all she ever wanted, if she swears allegiance to the First Order: a family, people who love her, people who would die for the love of her._

Rey and Snoke open their eyes in synchrony, and Rey knows the truth of the dark.

 --

An orange-striped X-wing starfighter is at the apex of the Resistance fleet, flying in V formation through an asteroid field, maneuvring this way and that to avoid chunks of comet. The astromech BB8 beeps and whistles in the droid port, and Poe laughs over the intercom as he translates the binary for his copilot, back-to-back in the little cockpit.

‘BB-8 just made this really funny joke. He said-‘

‘I don’t give a crap about the joke,’ Finn cuts him off, tightening his grip on the triggers of the targeting computer. He grimaces at Poe’s look of reproach. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood to fake-laugh when any number of us might be dead in an hour.’

‘We aren’t gonna die, buddy,’ Poe reassures him, his voice a little too hearty. ‘We’re invincible in this thing. And if worst comes to worst when we’re grounded, you know I’d take a blaster hit for you in a heartbeat.’

Finn whips round and grabs the pilot’s collar, yanking him back against his seat. ‘Don’t you _ever_ joke about that, Poe Dameron,’ he growls. ‘Just because you were born into the Resistance doesn’t mean you get to play the hero.’

‘All right, all right,’ Poe laughs, wriggling out from under Finn’s hands. ‘We can both be the heroes. Better?’

‘Neither of us are going to be heroes,’ Finn tells him, his voice raw with emotion, his gaze full of intensity as he looks at Poe. ‘We’re going to be _survivors_ , okay? All of us. Just survivors.’

‘Okay, buddy,’ Poe agrees quickly, turning back to the X-wing’s controls with worry written into every line of his face.

 --

Leia Organa’s personal spacecraft, an exquisite work of Alderaanian-style engineering dubbed _The Patriot,_ floats along behind the X-wing squadrons, carrying a smattering of rebel fighters loyal enough or stupid enough to agree to this harebrained mission. Jessika Pava mans the gunner bay in the downstairs area, Admiral Akbar sits at the helm of the starship, barking out orders, Temmin Wexley, or “Snap” as he is affectionately known, is double-checking their inventory of blasters. Chewbacca and Luke are playing Dejarik on a recently set-up holochess pad.

Other Resistance fighters that Kylo doesn’t know are bustling around the table he sits at, talking and laughing and enjoying the sense of camaraderie that emanates from everybody here. They’re all here because they _choose_ to be, not because they’re shoehorned into training programs from birth, like the Stormtroopers Phasma controls. And it’s cliché, but thinking about choices makes him think about Rey, and _that_ makes him remember the little pearl of wisdom she’d given him: _it’s the choices we make that define us._

What defines Rey? Her little hand, held out to him, her enemy, the day he’d fallen out of the Maralii tree? Deciding to heal his wounds (more than once), saving his life, choosing to trust him with a weapon despite his past attempts to kill her? Choosing to fly to Moraband with him, to be _intimate_ despite her misgivings, to tell him she loves him?

And what defines Kylo Ren, or Ben Solo for that matter? The choices he’s made in the past are sick, twisted things that have planted dark roots in his soul: slaughtering the next generation of Jedi, casually ordering the deaths of thousands, watching his dead father slide off the blade of his lightsaber, off an oscillator bridge. But he remembers his recent decisions, and how he’d once cursed himself for being such a sentimental fool, but realizes now that the choices he’s made lately are better than almost any he’s made in his entire life. Teaching Rey the saber forms. Rising up to destroy his oppressor, his Lord. Falling in love, learning to express emotion. Reconciling – sort of – with his mother.

_“I want to hate you, Ben Solo. But I can’t. I can’t forgive you for the things you’ve done, but for some godforsaken reason it still doesn’t stop me from hoping you’ll change.”_

Rey’s words to him, plucked from his recollection of the day he’d returned, covered in blue blood, from the battle on Felucia, resonate inside his head. And he knows, deep down, that he _has_ begun to change. Whether that’s due to the Force bond that still links them across countless lightyears of deep space, or just due to falling in love with her, Kylo Ren is no longer a time-bomb, no longer that lonely, angry _wound_ of a human being. He’s still a killer; still a Dark sider at heart, but Rey’s Light has lent him stability, given him a purpose other than fulfilling his grandfather’s destiny. At least for now, while she still lives and breathes, he has a reason to be a better person.

_For her. It’s all for her._

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________

**Sources for the effects of the poison:**

[Sith Poison](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_poison)

[Sith alchemy](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_alchemy)


	42. The Unbecoming

‘Let’s give the plan one last run-through.’

Leia rolls her eyes. ‘We’ve already been over this _three_ times, Luke. The whole thing is extremely derivative of your rescue mission back on the first Deathstar, anyway.’

‘In what way?’ her brother puts his hands on plastoid-coated hips, his stern voice muffled by the white helmet on his head, and Leia snorts with laughter.

It _has_ to be serendipity. Moments before, their transport shuttle had landed in Felucia’s jungle, and they’d accidentally intercepted a three-person Stormtrooper patrol. Kylo had rendered them unconscious before they could radio back to base, and Luke had reworked their original plan in a matter of seconds, to include Kylo, Leia and Luke dressing in the pilfered armour of the troopers to infiltrate the Felucian training complex, which is around two klicks west of their landing site.

‘I’m not wearing this crap,’ Kylo protests, pushing away the dismantled suit of armor Luke tries to give him.

‘Ben, it’s a better plan than the last,’ Leia reasons with him as she clips a plastene chest-plate into place. ‘Dressing as Stormtroopers will help us blend in on the base while you look for Rey, instead of storming in all guns blazing and getting discovered in minutes.’

‘We wouldn’t-‘ he starts to argue, but Chewbacca jams a Stormtrooper helmet over Ren’s head, effectively shutting him up as he breathes in the filtered, plastic-scented air of the mask. Another mask, for yet another incarnation of him. There have been so many.

‘Alright. We get inside the complex, locate Rey, do whatever’s necessary to smuggle her out without attracting attention, then meet with Black Leader at the assigned point and begin the bombing run,’ Luke confirms, and they’re off, arrowing through the blue-leafed trees, every step making Kylo’s heart thud with combined worry and hope. What will he see when – _if_ – he finds Rey? Will she be the same fierce, enchanting little creature he’d known so well a week ago? Or will Snoke have broken her spirit as he’d vowed to do, back on the Dahlia?

Kylo of all people knows how much things can change in a week, when you tune in to the whispers of the ghosts inside. As the dense foliage of the jungle starts to thin out, fear twists deep in his gut, and Luke raises a hand to slow their footsteps as they reach the edge of the treeline and the First Order training complex comes into view: a sprawling, whitewashed stone facility, with clear rounded bubbles of glass extending out of every facet of the building, providing clear vantage points from every direction for the base’s security. They would have been spotted instantly, and the alarm would have been raised if they weren’t in Stormtrooper uniform.

‘See? Plan beta is better,’ Leia hisses to Kylo as Luke speaks into the comm-wire that connects him to Poe Dameron’s X-wing radio.

‘We’re disguised as Stormtroopers, so if you see three of them coming towards your X-wing with a Wookiee in tow, don’t be alarmed. We’re going in. Over and out.’

Nobody spares them so much as a curious glance as the three troopers escort the unarmed Wookiee into the complex. They are invisible, as insignificant as all Stormtroopers once were to Kylo Ren – before FN2187 broke ranks and defected to the Resistance, he’d never given a thought to the fact that beneath their plastoid exoskeletons, Stormtroopers are individuals with _personalities_ , with aspirations and feelings. They’d always been like ants to him: useful, but to be either ignored or crushed underfoot when the need arose.

The transparisteel doors slide open to admit then into a gleaming foyer of white duracrete, with innumerable offshoots of corridors like the neural mapping of a brain. There’s no frame of reference for Kylo here, no blueprint to follow besides the faint, lovely pulse of Rey at the back of his mind – and he gets a rush of exhilaration at the weak drum of her heartbeat, her flickering light as he draws a path to her through the link.

‘To the left,’ he tells Skywalker, and the Jedi nods, motioning to the others to bank left down a narrow passageway. They emerge onto a patchily built mezzanine, every flaw in its design highlighted by the halogen bulbs in the ceiling. The entire structure looks ready to crumble underfoot, looking exactly like it was built while the First Order struggled to gain traction after the Resistance’s surprise assault. This is proof that without Kylo and Hux present as co-captains, the First Order implodes. Snoke, the puppetmaster, is useless without his puppets.

He doesn’t have time to mull that over now, not while Rey is waiting to be found. He directs Skywalker through the numerous dips and curves of hallways, and all the while his terror mounts: will Rey still be the same fierce, enchanting creature he’d gotten to know in the last months, or will she be broken, tamed, changed permanently by Snoke’s attentions? He of all people knows how much gratification Snoke gets from deconstructing a person’s spirit, piece by careful piece. He’d torn Ben Solo to shreds, years ago.

 --

_The last Jedi is here, and he’s brought the unfaithful apprentice, along with the whelp’s mother. The Force is with them, wrapping itself around them like ribbons round gifts, shiny and pretty. The Skywalkers all have similar energies and spectrums within their Force signatures, and Rey drinks in the colours: the shifting gunmetal of Ben, the dazzling blue of Luke and the vivacious, vibrant gold of Leia Organa._

_She brushes up against Ben’s mind, the link between them still intact. His mind is slippery and brimming with fear, for her and of her. He’s close, getting closer to the arena where she lies in wait, a serpent readying herself for the fatal strike._

Rey’s mind skips and stutters like a broken radio, fading into static every few seconds and surging back, loud and crackly with disjointed moments. Lapses in time. Scratches, lines etched in metal walls. The wilted twigs of dead flowers on a windowsill. Soulful, dark brown eyes, almost black in their intensity as they look at her. Lava clotting like blood in cracks ripped into the earth. A congealed, bright blue substance, heavy on her tongue. Darkness, crushing and all-consuming.

Everything feels insubstantial, like glimpses into an alternate reality as her hand rises of its own accord, igniting the saberstaff she was holding all along.

 --

They move quickly and quietly, a stealthy foursome advancing on the swell of dark power that waits behind the door at the back of the passageway. Kylo’s led them this far, but the corridor they’ve turned down has come to a dead end, and Rey’s Force signature has all but disappeared in the overwhelming shadow of Snoke’s.

Luke reaches out and opens the door, revealing a vast training arena, concrete floors under a domed glass ceiling, strips of a sunny Felucian sky.

Kylo’s neck prickles under the helmet, and he removes it, the others following suit as a slim figure in black leather and armour steps forward, pink saberstaff garish in the light of day.

‘ _Rey_ ,’ Kylo breathes, and the girl raises one black-gloved hand, pinning all four of them in place with a burst of power so strong it sends aftershocks through their bones.

‘I thought you’d come back,’ the girl says emotionlessly, advancing on Kylo now, her free hand still outstretched, other hand gripping her saberstaff like a lifeline. ‘But you’re too late. The damage is done, the poison has taken root.’

Kylo snarls as he tries to throw off the paralysis. ‘ _What… poison_?’ he grunts.

Rey only smiles, and when she answers, her voice is not the sweet, dulcet tone he’s come to recognise as hers, but the sibilant hiss of a monster. ‘What do you think of my new form, Kylo Ren? Rather more attractive than the last, though I say so myself.’

‘ _Snoke_. What have you done?’ Leia gasps, and the monster’s hazel eyes turn on her, threads of darkness reaching out for his mother at the same time Rey’s hands do. Kylo tries to warn her, screaming at Leia with every iota of Force telepathy he possesses to _run, get away, go_ – but Rey’s hands are around his mother’s neck and she’s lifting, _squeezing_ , his mother’s bright presence in the Force dimming as her life is strangled out of her by this creature wearing Rey’s skin-

There’s a savage, inhuman roar, and he doesn’t know whether it comes from him or Luke or Chewbacca, but all of them are tearing free of the immobility and running at Rey.

The beast inside her is a terrifying black hole, a lightless singularity that slams against their Force signatures again and again. It saps their will as it duels them both, saberstaff spinning in a gyroscope of pink, spitting multicolored sparks as it connects with Luke’s green and Kylo’s black.

Kylo might be screaming, might be sobbing, but it doesn’t fucking matter as the girl he loves rips a burning gash across his chest and sends him stumbling backward, seeing the sheer, inhuman glee on her face – Snoke’s face – as she turns to engage the last Jedi. Either way this ends, Kylo loses, he can _see_ it happening before it does, and he can’t bear to see either death come to pass.

‘ _Leave her alone! She’s mine_!’ he screams at Luke, the order triggering a flashback of the time he’d told his Knights to do the same, so that he might spare that irritating little girl with the brilliant light, the one who stands before him now, twirling her lightsaber in lazy arcs, unfazed by his complete breakdown in front of her.

Luke steps back to where Chewbacca tends to an unconscious Leia, keeping his saber at eye-level as Snoke, possessing Rey, focuses on Kylo again.

Rey walks fluidly towards him, a nightmare dressed up in his darkest daydreams, throwing out her saberstaff to clash against his Darksaber, dark pink purpling as it meets black. Her strikes are controlled and deadly, and Kylo slips into defence mode as his Lord follows him around the arena, punctuating each word with a sizzle of plasma beams.

‘ _You – are – as – poor – a – savior – as – you – were – an – apprentice_ ,’ Snoke grunts through Rey’s clenched teeth, striking Kylo’s saber in a barrage of frenzied attacks that knock him flying, send him sprawling face-first onto the concrete before her, energy leeching from him and into Rey, fuelling the devil that drives her. ‘A pity - we could have ruled together, you and I. Instead you perish, here at my feet.’ Her lightsaber hums as she holds it, marks a cross over his heart in the air. ‘All that you love will be swept from this arena, as offal is from the slaughterhouse floor. And as you die, you will know that dark always triumphs over light in the end.’

Just as she swings the lightsaber, Kylo uses his last ounce of endurance to mine their link, pulling power from the seething pool of darkness in her, channeling it to throw a Force blast at Rey that sends her skittering backward, almost dropping her saberstaff. It reminds him of their training sessions onboard the Corellian corvette, of the sheen of pride in her eyes when he’d used the Light to heal her wounds, when she’d kissed him so tenderly, so happily. The memories give Kylo the strength to stand, bleeding heavily, and face her.

‘You’re _wrong_ ,’ he spits, blood sheeting from his broken nose, and he lurches forward, batting her saberstaff aside to seize her little chin in one hand, crushing his lips against hers, giving her _everything,_ all of the Light that he’s buried for all these years.

The graveyard of his mind is howling as he exhumes it, as he digs deep to find the glimmers of light and lets them run free, shivering to the surface as he presses his mouth harder to hers, even as she struggles and screeches like a wildcat, trying to pull away from the kiss.

He imbues the link with every good thing that’s ever happened to him, every pleasant memory, every childhood dream that he’s kept under lock and key: butterflies; hothouses of summer flowers; playing with rainbow soaps in the bath with his mother; juggling balls with Luke in the sitting room of his apartment; sitting in the cockpit of the _Falcon_ on his father’s lap, giggling and punching the buttons that make the lights outside melt into pretty white streaks; and he’s weeping, tears streaming down his cheeks as he shows her all that he is, everything that Ben Solo remembers, before the link bursts open and they both fall into the void, orbiting eachother like dead stars pulled towards an event horizon as he pulls Rey’s essence away from Snoke and into the never-ending tesseract of the Force bond.

 --

_Rey gasps, dizzy inhalations of oxygen, momentarily freed from the black asphyxiation of Snoke’s control as Kylo freefalls into the node that connects their minds, dragging her down with him._

_It’s deep, where he takes her, further than they’ve ever explored, even on that night when they cradled eachother’s faces and dived into the link, in his bedroom on Starkiller. They swim together, tiny bright lights in the Force, escaping the suffocating darkness of Snoke’s influence in this heaven, this haven that is their Force bond._

_They drift forever, through rippling waves of entropy and enthalpy, the universe inside their bond a continuum, constantly decaying and reforming as they bottom out, hitting the absolute depth of the nexus, and there’s something there: two globes, fused together like malformed bubbles, one an incandescent white, the other a scabby grey, patches of pale light shining through the peeling cracks. Rey knows, somehow, that they’re looking at an estimation of their own souls, welded together through a mix of fate and choice and the Force._

_Ghosts sing mournfully in her head as she reaches out to touch the manifestation of their souls: balls of energy, dark lensing over light, like dying stars. Her fingertips brush the pulsing orbs, and Rey is astonished and terrified all at once._

_Millions upon millions of pictures unfurl from the globes like threads spooling out from a tapestry. Colours in brighter shades than her eyes have ever seen are mingling, blending together to form memories of things that have both already happened and not yet come to pass._

_Sitting in her toppled AT-AT, hugging her knees to her chest as a sandstorm flings itself against the scrap shelter. Running flight simulations on her makeshift computer. Trekking in the Goazon Badlands, her belly empty and aching, trying to scavenge enough to trade for even a quarter portion._

_The pink tree, blossoms floating over their bodies, blanketing them as they make love in the iridescent soil. The first Force dream they shared._

_A tall, colt-like boy with a face full of pimples and sticking-out ears hidden by tufts of raven hair, smirking arrogantly as a tiny little girl levitates a stack of pebbles. Rey._

_An older version of her, brown hair flowing over her back as a calmer, less anarchic Kylo kisses her under an awning of roses, then later, rocks into her with a trembling kind of elegance in a bed, sheets tossed carelessly to the side to make room for the passionate disorder that can’t be contained in this room._

_Ben Solo, doing aeroplanes with a small toddler, cooing in its ear as Rey sits at the dinner table. The toddler turns its head, and its hazel eyes mirror hers, framed by a shock of black curls and set in a pouty, pink-lipped face. The spitting image of Kylo Ren._

_Everything is so bright, the gaudy colours of their past, present and future stamping themselves on the lobes of her brain. The potential, the possibilities of a life that’s everything Rey ever wanted, is too much to take in. The Force has been the catalyst all along, pitching them back together again and again, bringing them over and over to that point of balance: the Light and the Dark, the angel and the demon, the ebony and ivory. It has brought them to the precipice on which they currently stand, ready to either walk away from it all or throw themselves off the cliff in a suicidal kind of fearlessness, not caring about the way they’ll land, whether they’ll shatter their own bones or eachother’s._

_One tiny step will break the earth apart underneath them, but Rey knows it has to be done. She reaches out, twining her imaginary fingers with Kylo Ren’s, and asks the crucial question._

‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’

_They hurl themselves over the edge, becoming one with the Force, with eachother’s identities, sublimating their separate energies into one scorching, monumental sphere of energy that contains enough raw Force to decimate every star system, then rebuild it, better than before, from the wreckage. It’s neither dark or light, it is **all** , every sliding shade of the rainbow as their souls collide, bringing their time-bomb into detonation, a neutron blast whose radiation utterly expels Snoke’s presence from her mind, burns up the dregs of the Sith poison in her body, unable to endure the combined power of the Dark and the Light, and everything in between the absolutes._

 --

‘This isn’t how I thought this rescue mission would go,’ Luke comments as he and his twin stand forgotten, transfixed by the light show in front of their eyes.

‘It’s better that the fireworks on Endor Day,’ Leia murmurs, watching avidly as her son and the Padawan she’s come to view as a surrogate daughter battle eachother, locked in a kiss that strobes gold light from every brush of contact.

Chewie growls.

‘You’re right. Ben’s got it under control. We’ll call in Black Leader and look for Snoke.’

Luke nods at Chewbacca, then grabs his twin’s hand and tugs her toward the arena door, leaving Kylo and Rey behind. Leia glances over her shoulder as they exit: the pair are beginning to glow brighter than a nova as they melt into one being, her unfolding into him or vice versa, the trapped energy between them burgeoning like the particles that make up a galaxy, destined to explode into being.

 


	43. Equinox

They are an equinox, the equal balance between night and day as his dark soul melds with her light. Her ears ring as the light of the Force fills her mind to bursting, golden and victorious. Snoke’s stigmatic presence melts away, the Force trembling like an earthquake as his essence reforms somewhere else, and that’s _terrifying_ – but he’s no longer controlling her, and that’s all that matters for now.

She draws deep, cathartic breaths as she disentangles herself from Kylo’s arms, her sight restored as she gazes up at him. And he’s _glowing_ , a pale shimmer of warmth lifting from his skin in between the plastoid plates. She takes one of his hands and kisses the afterglow.

‘ _Rey_ ,’ he chokes up, eyes welling, ‘I’m so-‘

‘ _Shhhh_.’ She presses a finger to his blood-smeared lips. ‘I’m fine, everything’s okay, I’m _with_ you.’

The knight gathers her into his arms again, resting his cheek on the crown of her head, which is quickly becoming damp from his tears. ‘You’re always with me,’ he says brokenly. ‘Don’t you ever fucking leave.’

She hugs him hard, a solid promise. And time lapses into nothingness as she brings her lips to his, bodies getting to know eachother again after days of separation. He parts her lips with a sly tongue, his thumb caressing her cheekbone and stealing every shred of oxygen from her lungs. His kiss is rough and wild, as if he’s worried she’ll descend back into Snoke’s grasp at any moment, and there’s never been a less appropriate time to get turned on, but it happens as Kylo sucks her lower lip into his mouth and grazes the plump flesh with his teeth.

‘Oh…’ she sighs, knees weakening as she sinks into the kiss. She presses closer to him, heat starting to pool in her belly and spreading like wildfire when his hands skim over her shape, slip under her clothes. His fingers play at the waistband of her pants and-

Alarms split the air around them, barking out a warning as the marching feet of Stormtroopers gets louder and closer. Kylo rips his mouth off hers, coming back to reality in stops and starts, cursing himself for getting so distracted in what was meant to be a cut-and-run mission. Obviously, his idiot family’s gotten themselves discovered or captured, and Rey and he are in a room with only one exit.

He looks down on her, at her blushing berry cheeks and kiss-bruised lips. She’s actually _smiling_ , and it’s absurd in the gravity of their situation.

‘To first blood?’ she jests, eyes twinkling, and it takes a moment before he catches the drift, then spins her around so they’re back to back and ignites the Darksaber with a buzz of adrenaline.

‘We kill them all,’ he says grimly, and on cue, the door crumples and a squadron of riot troopers advances, weapons trained on them. Kylo squares his shoulders as Rey throws up a hand, her Force blast flinging four troopers against the wall of the arena with a sickening crack of plastoid, and they slide down the wall like discarded toys, lying still. She’s incapacitating them, not killing, and it makes Ren sigh in resignation before he cuts a swath through the infantry.

He’s efficient, pitiless, and Rey can’t help but stare as Kylo’s saber flies, deflecting bright slugs of plasma and fending off vibro-maces. He dispatches the last unfortunate soldier with a slash to the throat, and moves towards the bent metal door. _Come on._

They run out the door and through the corridor, turning a corner and coming face to face with an attack team of Flametroopers. Rey ducks underneath the first two, propelling her saberstaff up in a perfectly balanced strike that cuts off the cylinders of their flamethrowers in a shower of iridium sparks. Their weapons useless, they fall to Kylo’s dark blade, the others meeting identical fates before Kylo grabs Rey’s hand and tugs her along, retracing his footsteps through the facility as it begins to shake, deafening _booms_ reverberating off the outside walls. Skywalker’s called in the airstrike, much too early. _Fool_!

They race through the maze of passageways, trying to find the mezzanine or the Skywalkers or both. They round another bend and a beam of plasma splatters off the corner by her head, and Kylo lets out an animalistic snarl, slicing the Darksaber through her would-be killer’s neck, parting his bucket-helmet from his body. Rey grins to herself – who would have guessed _Kylo Ren_ would have a saviour complex?

‘We’ve got to get back to Black Leader!’ Kylo shouts over the earsplitting blasts of cannon-fire and sirens’ wails. Rey’s heart leaps with joy – _Poe is here? And Finn?_ She stretches her mind, finding her friends’ bright lights in the matrix, and she snatches Kylo’s hand.

‘This way!’ They run down another passageway, out through the blast doors that open onto the tropical jungle, the ground shaking beneath their feet as the Resistance looses their artillery fire, sending the forests up in flames.

The Force flexes around them as they run, and as they approach the landing site, instinct gnaws at her gut and she knows something’s _very_ _wrong_. Discomfort builds into outright panic as they stumble into the clearing where Poe parked his starfighter; see the flames licking at the propellers, the engine exploding in an orange-black mushroom cloud.

‘ _Shit_!’ Kylo catches her before she can run too close to the X-wing as it catches alight, becomes a fireball that spits smaller meteors of flame at them, past them. Rey turns to watch the pyrotechnics, and a flare of silver-red catches her eye, fire glinting off chrome armour as Phasma emerges from the burning trees, carrying a skeletal, black-robed figure in her arms.

‘ ** _Stop_** ,’ the computerized voice issues from her helm. Kylo, who hasn’t yet seen the result of what he did to Phasma’s throat with the Darksaber, looks at her with a blend of curiosity and fear.

\--

Snoke’s power is tangible, a roiling mass of black energy that emanates from him as Phasma sets him to rights. He is weakened in body, but his rage at being thwarted has only made him more potent as he raises one hand and summons a spearhead of indigo lightning, funneling it directly at Kylo, who shields Rey, white-hot electricity melting through the plastoid armour, sizzling on his skin. Everything is screaming and primary colours, red flame and blue lightning and yellow Light as Rey channels it straight back at Snoke and Phasma, a bubble of golden energy blossoming from her palms, shielding Kylo from electrocution, placing him under her protection.

‘You can’t win,’ Snoke intones in a silken voice, tempered by fury. Electricity still crackles at his fingertips, increasing voltage.

‘ _You’ve_ already lost,’ Rey snarls at the dark lord, pointing the blade of her saberstaff at Snoke’s pitted, ancient face. ‘You lost the moment you tried to corrupt me, to influence Ben. Even if we die, we’ll die free from you. Rot in hell.’

Snoke chuckles and crooks a finger, bursting her bubble with a dagger of dark power. The Dark lord flicks his hand and Rey is hurled against a burning tree, engulfed in brilliant flame.

Kylo _screams_ at the loss, and the darkness that envelops him is his and his alone as he lashes out at his former master, unleashing every drop of terrible Dark that swirls inside him as he flies at the wraith in the cloak, slicing his saber through the shield around Snoke, beating at it with black pulses of energy that aim to smother, to kill.

Again and again he hammers at Snoke’s defences, all saber Forms discarded and replaced by wrath that is _too_ mighty as it bubbles up inside, crushing his lungs and heart and throat as it devours from the inside out. He’s splitting at the seams, light and dark bleeding out in jugular spurts as tears roll down his cheeks, as Snoke whips a hand out past his shield and grabs Kylo by the hair, dragging him forward and into his black orbit.

His senses wink out one by one as the master rests a hand against Kylo’s cheek in a charade of tenderness; the way Han Solo stroked his face on the bridge of the oscillator. And it’s as easy as that: with one touch, the beast has its claws in his flesh, his reign supreme as Snoke cyclones through his mind, his memories ripped out and laid bare before his lord, red-raw and oozing.

 _My, my._ The Supreme Leader lingers over a mosaic of memories: shaking hands with FN21 – _Finn_ – in the conference room on Coruscant, talking with Leia over the holopad, twining his limbs with Rey’s in the little cot, kissing her under a meadow of stars, their wordless promise to stay together forever after. _Look at the false future you’ve spun for yourself. Most impressive. Not what your grandfather would have been content with._

He’s right, of course. He’s always been right about Kylo Ren: the monster, and the murderer, the grandson of Darth Vader. The sunlight, so short-lived, so radiant while it lasted, dies and Kylo is undone, the darkness flooding in. Once again he is that creature of raw, unbridled _feeling_ , and his body isn’t his as Snoke nudges him back into the fray, his saber alight as he dimly registers the presences of that infernal Wookiee, his mother and the last Jedi, as they emerge from the treeline.

Everything is serenity and silence as Kylo’s legs carry him towards his uncle. The Jedi is a beacon of Light, a conflagration in the already burning forest. His throbbing power is anathema to Kylo in this altered state, like a riptide drawing on the Dark, trying to pull him under, surrender him to the Light again. Snoke won’t let it happen.

Drunk on darkness, he twirls the Darksaber, clashing black blade against poison-green beam. Time contracts, his vision spotting and tunneling as he confronts the first person to show him the power in goodness; the first among many who gave up on him. He is hatred and rage as he strikes, a black-scaled cobra with a fanged weapon.

Hazily, he hears his mother’s screams as the chrome Stormtrooper charges at her, slugs of blue plasma arcing off her armour. She’s talking to _him_ , something that sounds like _stay_! or _Rey!_ It doesn’t matter anyway. Rey is gone. Dead.

The hand that holds his saber starts to bend inward, the black plasma positioning itself over his heart.

 _Don’t you dare, Ben Solo_ , someone intones into his mind.

Everybody stops as a woman’s outline, wreathed in flame and emitting a cold white light, hovers in the air above them. Rey’s eyes are milk-white and pupilless, her face angelically blank, and she is fire and ice as she falls to earth, a phoenix whose sempiternal power gathers, becoming a burning cannonball that flies directly at Snoke, chipping away at his shield before he can think to raise a hand against her.

The Supreme Leader’s defences are dissolving like ore in the solder of her flame, and as the last slivers of his power disappear, a green ray blooms like a daisy-stem from his torso, as Luke Skywalker runs his lightsaber clean through Snoke’s wasted back.

 --

Ben awakens as Snoke’s blood hisses, black and glutinous, eroding into the soil.

Rey collapses, whatever celestial Force that used her as its conduit leaving her skin charred and bones fractured.

Chewbacca discharges his bowcaster in a well-aimed shot through Phasma’s armour joints, blowing the chrome trooper to smithereens.

Leia stares at her son as he drops the Darksaber before it can pierce his chest; as he slumps next to the girl who sacrificed it all, the only one who saw the truth of him and didn’t flinch away.

He rocks her blackened, broken body in his arms: his anchor, his saving grace, his everything.

 


	44. Wildflower

Sugar-glazed petals float on the breeze, landing on the shoulders of the girl who sits underneath the _Maralii_ tree, cross-legged and meditating.

Her tranquility is at odds with the faint beeps of droids and thunks of wrecking balls on duracrete, the organized demolition in the background. The Felucian First Order facility has been slated for destruction for months, and they’re removing the last foundations now. The roots of the Order run deep, but slowly, Felucia is being returned to the humid, colourful jungle it once was.

Wildflowers are beginning to bud in the warm soil, and the trees are shedding blackened bark in the underwood, sparkling with amber sap - proof that nature always flourishes, will grow back no matter how badly it is damaged.

She’s the same, the girl called Rey.

Four months in a kolto tank, her lungs artificially inflated and deflated by manmade apparatus, her heart kept beating by sparkplugs. She had become more machine than human as new skin grew over the healing layers of flesh, as her brain was poked and prodded at by medical droids, making sure it mended without any visible scarring.

When she’d been brought out of the coma and discharged, the first question from her disused lips was ‘ _Where is Kylo Ren?’_

The orderly had replied that he didn’t know whom she meant, but if she was talking about _Ben Solo_ , he was safe and currently on Coruscant with his mother, but both would be traveling back to Felucia in a week’s time to oversee the removal of the First Order complex.

And so Rey has waited all week, watering the flowers that bloom underfoot or climbing trees in the vast rainforest, eating the sun-ripened fruit of the melon-trees. She eats her other meals in the temporary living space the Resistance has constructed here, and meditates out by the _Maralii_ tree at twilight, when the moons are brightest and she can feel their shine seeping into her skin, neither light nor dark, but silver-grey.

 --

Ben Solo is a tangle of frayed nerves and overlarge feet as he steps off the _Millenium Falcon_.

It’s been four months since she walked or talked, an entire season since he touched her or kissed her. _So much has changed - how is it possible to expect everything to slot back into place?_

He’d insisted on staying, slept next to her suspension tank for a solid month, until Finn and Poe, who survived the airstrike completely unscathed and just as infuriating as before, had literally kidnapped him under the cover of night and brought him to General Organa, who knocked some sense into him. The battle was over, but the war wasn’t won.

Leia had strong-armed him back to Coruscant, where after many conventions with the Galactic Senate and none too few emotional outbursts, both his and hers, it was decided that Ben Solo would be fitted with a tracking chip and exiled from the Core Worlds. He is not permitted within one parsec of Corellia, Kuat, Eufornis Major or any of the other planets in that classification, and some poor bastard has the job of charting his movements from behind a computer screen, but the rest of the galaxy is his to roam.

This is his first pilgrimage.

 --

Rey can feel his mind brush up against the bond, a warm light that blooms in the long-dormant link. She smiles to herself, getting to her feet as a tall figure strides into the clearing with faux confidence, coming to a standstill when he spots her underneath the tree of swaying pink blossoms.

His clothes are different – just a simple black shirt and military-issue black pants, and his hair is slightly longer, curling past his shoulders, but the intensity in his brown eyes is the same as he steps toward her, hesitantly, as though she’s a nymph, a delicate dryad that he must try not to startle away.

He stops right in front of her, and his chin trembles like he’s about to cry.

‘Hello, Ben,’ she murmurs, and she wraps her arms around him.

He melts into her touch, the cosmos of their history spreading across the link. Everything is both remembered and new as she roves her eyes over the freckles on his face, the curve of his brow, the pink bow of his lips as she stands on tiptoe to kiss them.

The kiss says everything she can’t, and when he responds, it feels like coming home.

 --

They explore eachother for hours, kissing til their lips go numb, reading eachother’s every thought and feeling through the bond, catching up on all they’ve missed. The twilit woods slip toward nightfall, patches of phosphorescence lighting up the deepening dark.

His lips move to her neck, braver now that darkness has fallen, and she moans at the sensation of his hot mouth on her pulse. He drinks in the heady elixir of her skin, the perfume of her hair, and when he pulls back to meet her gaze, her eyes are glassy with tears, and they perfectly reflect the diamonds in the night sky.

He loves her, he _loves_ her, and he holds her close as her tears rain down like summer showers.

\-- 

This is better than before, she thinks as his hands slide reverently over her shape: she the holy Bible, and he the humble convert. The other four times they’ve done this have been rushed, full of desperation or lust or need, with the constant threat of death colouring each interaction.

But this _connection_ ; the native understanding they share as he slowly begins to unbutton her tunic, exposing the skin of her breasts to the night air; feels like a different life. _Feels like love._

He presses her back against the trunk of the _Maralii_ tree, kissing her with a passion she hasn’t felt in far too long as he peels her tunic off, throwing the clothes over his shoulder before his hands drift over her waist, down her hips and between her thighs, still covered by the wet cloth of her panties.

‘Come with me, Rey,’ he whispers into her ear. ‘I’ll take you anywhere.’

She stares at him, gives him a lascivious smile. He’s already so hard against her; she can feel the throbbing heat of him through the layers of clothing that separate them.

The breeze rustles the branches of the tree, blossoms loosening and falling onto their shoulders and hair. Rey plucks a petal from Ben’s black waves and skims it over his cheek. ‘Do you remember the dream?’

 --

His eyes darken, becoming almost onyx as he thinks about the first Force dream: the swirl of petals, the bioluminescence, the beautiful girl, as she removes his shirt, plants a soft-lipped kiss on his collarbone. Remember the dream? He never left it.

‘I missed you,’ he murmurs, kissing the satin skin of her chest and stomach, lowering onto his knees as he trails his lips down her hipbone. ‘I missed _this_.’

‘Me too,’ she sighs, his hot breath setting fire to her skin, and she squirms under his hands as he pushes her undergarments aside and slides his fingers between her legs.

He looks up at her in awe, dark eyes full of tenderness as she blooms for him like she always does, his desert wildflower, as he slips two fingers inside her, eliciting a little purr of satisfaction. She can’t stop herself from writhing at his touch, grinding her sex into his hand, tantalized by the quick, deft strokes of his fingers.

 --

‘Kiss me,’ she gasps, tugging on his soft hair, and he rises up to capture her mouth with his own, caressing her breasts as her nipples pebble in the cool night. Her face and chest are flushed pink with arousal, and if they don’t do something about this ache he’s made between her legs, she’s going to explode.

Last scraps of clothing removed, she guides him down until they’re both lying on the forest floor, and there’s only a second’s hesitation as Ben adjusts her underneath him, his calloused hands on her thighs making her shiver, and then he’s pushing into her, so suddenly and deeply it makes them both gasp in shock. He fills her to the cusp as he covers her body with his, and this bliss is all brand new.

This is how they find eachother, with sticky hands and open hearts. He buries his face in the crook of her neck; breathing shakily as she tilts her hips up, meeting him halfway through the first deep, slow thrust.

 --

It feels _too_ good, burying himself inside her after so many months, and as he moves, he can’t resist watching her, seeing the reactions to every thrust chase across her lovely face, her lips parting with each rub of friction.

He doesn’t break eye contact with her, every emotion readable on both their faces as they stare at eachother, and Rey smiles sweetly, matching his rhythm as he moves, stroking harder and deeper, the weight of him pushing her into the earth, petals and leaves sticking to the damp skin of her back and legs.

The bond _sings_ as they become one entity, sharing skin and bones in the darkness, uniting lungs and trading heartbeats. His mouth circles a nipple and she arcs up against him, and he angles deeper in response, until he’s fully hilted in her heat.

‘Oh, God, Rey,’ he rasps as she winds her arms around his neck and _clings_ , her nails digging half-moons in his back, raking along his spine. Sweat slicks both their skins, the decadent slide of flesh in wet flesh forcing all kinds of pre-verbal noises from both of their throats.

He _has_ to come when she moans his name into his ear, legs curling around his lower back to pull his cock in _so deep,_ and colours swirl at the edges of his vision as he spends himself in her, the sudden hot rush taking Rey over the edge too, milking the come from his cock as her walls clamp around him and she screams out her release.

 --

He rolls off her, delirious from the strength of his climax, as he lies spread-eagled on the forest floor. Rey waits until her muscles stop trembling, and then eases herself up onto an elbow, tracing a finger over the curve of his bicep, over the architecture of his shoulder. She never wants to give this up, this feeling of _belonging_ together. The unbroken bond shines like interstellar dust, condensing into nascent stars that brighten the bridge between their minds.

‘Hey,’ Rey says huskily, and he turns to face her, smiling languidly. ‘When you said you’d take me anywhere…?’

Ben’s face scrunches up in a loveable snicker. ‘I didn’t mean it that way, though I’m grateful for your interpretation of the words.’

She smacks his shoulder. ‘Please! In all honesty, though, where would we go?’

He shrugs, dusting himself off as he sits up. ‘I’ve been banned from any planet that flies the Republic banner, but that’s just a fraction of the universe. Chewbacca gifted me the Falcon before he went back to Kashykk – something about legacy and birthright and all that - so I can fly anywhere except to the Core Worlds. I could travel to the thousand moons of Iego; or the ice caves of Hoth, or the ruins of the Star Forge on Rakata Prime. _Anywhere_.’

‘You need a decent pilot,’ Rey comments, a wry smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

‘I need _you_ ,’ he corrects, skimming his fingers over her cheek, pressing a kiss to the sensitive spot at the base of her jaw. ‘Come with me.’

She looks up at him shyly, through her eyelashes, and this moment is so tender, so unlike anything they’ve exchanged before. There’s no sadness, no fear here – they’re safer in the forest.

But they’ve always been children flirting with fire, tempting fate. Since when did either of them play it safe?

So she seizes Ben’s face and kisses him with a fury. ‘Let’s get out of here. Where’s your ship? When do we leave?’

He stands up and offers her his hand. ‘Right now.’

She cocks an eyebrow. ‘We should probably put some clothes on first.’

‘Fuck _that_.’ He bends down and scoops her into in his arms, carrying her through the jungle like Adam and Eve, taking the first steps into their paradise. Like a groom carrying his bride over the threshold into married life, he brings her into the waiting _Falcon_ and deposits her gently in the pilot’s chair.

Rey runs her fingers over the dashboard buttons like a pianist over ivory keys, and when they break atmo, the jungle planet revolving in their ion trail, it feels like this moment should be accompanied by an orchestra; like an entire _opera_ should be penned to describe this great escape. Turquoise gas clouds swirl outside their viewport, constellations winking in silver coronas, and the whole galaxy expands before them: limitless paths, endless possibilities _. Anywhere, everywhere._

Ben hugs her from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder. Through the bond, his thoughts are calm, a little wondrous as he gazes out at the stars and nebulae, like it's the first time he's ever truly seen them.

_This is happiness._

                                                            

**BURIED LIGHT**

 


End file.
